Calorie Burn – How Many?

What kind of calorie burn do you get from a specific exercise? How many calories should you burn each day? How many calories do you need to burn to lose a pound? I’m not sure any of those questions really matter.

Caloric expenditure is not as straightforward as one might think. I want to attempt to give you some food for thought that will hopefully challenge some of your assumptions and maybe, help to steer the whole conversation in a more productive direction.

It’s Hard To Burn A Lot Of Calories

You don’t burn that many calories when you workout. Even at high intensity, the number just isn’t big enough to make as much of a difference as we tend to believe. Running, for example, 7 miles in one hour is roughly 500 calories. If we take the common formula that it takes 3500 calories burned to lose a pound of fat (which is only a rule of thumb for illustration purposes), then we’d have to run enough to burn 500 calories every day of the week. According to the Mayo Clinic, that’s roughly a distance of 7 miles per day.

The Fitter You Are, The Fewer Calories Burned

Jumping off from the first section, you should also know that more exercise does not necessarily translate into more calories burned. As you get into better shape, your body becomes more efficient and this efficiency means that you expend fewer calories for the same amount of work. In other words, ironically, the more in shape you are, the harder it is to burn a lot of calories working out. This needn’t discourage you though, because being in better shape is of course a good thing. All it means is that the way we think about calorie burn should really be different.  It’s not all about big numbers.

Here’s an article about seasoned runners and this phenomenon.

There May Be An Upper Limit To Caloric Expenditure

A recent study has purportedly shown that there is an upper threshold for calorie burn. If exercise induced burn gets high enough, the body will compensate by saving calories in other areas, such as the reproductive system. In other words, your body doesn’t let you expend calories with no limit. One theory is that this may be left over from our early evolution. It helps to prevent you from starving if you find yourself having to do a lot more physical activity for your food in one season versus another.

I warn that this is just one study, so we don’t know anything for sure, but it is more ammunition for the idea that obsessing over calories is probably more of a distraction than anything else. Read for yourself here:

CNN – Here’s Why You Exercise So Much And Still Can’t Lose Weight

Something Positive To Say About It All: Calorie Burn Doesn’t Happen Only During The Exercising

Basically, you burn calories while you exercise, as we all know. However, exercise also changes your body. In particular, if you can increase your muscle mass you can increase your metabolism. With muscles to feed, your body burns more calories throughout the entire day. This is a fantastic reason for everyone (barring specific, medical exceptions) to include strength training as part of their fitness program. To clarify, I am not advocating that we obsess over calorie burn, what I am saying is that how we think about them matters. It is good to know that a more fit body has a higher metabolism. That is not the same as trying to burn 1,000 calories every exercise session in the hopes that a pound will melt off.

Conclusion

I hope that these little bits of info at least point out that it’s not as simple as it is always portrayed. The benefits of exercise, and thus our reasons for making it a part of our lives, are more complicated than counting calories. The good news is, there are many more wonderful payouts to being more physically active – it’s a much richer world than one might think.

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