The Reality of Calorie Burn

NPR (Reality Check: To Burn Off A Soda You’ll Have To Run 50 Minutes) reported last Friday on research that was done at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health that I was thrilled to see! The researchers looked at what would happen if, instead of posting calories at restaurants, we posted the amount of physical activity required to burn off a particular item of food. This is a great study and a great strategy in a society that overestimates the role of exercise in weight loss.The Mayo Clinic has a list of exercises and their corresponding calorie burn on it’s website (Exercise for weight loss: Calories burned in 1 hour). It turns out that most forms of exercise really only burn a relatively small amount of calories. That means that exercise is not very effective in balancing our caloric intake and affecting weight loss. In fact, most people would be pretty surprised at what it takes to burn off even one Soda. The Johns Hopkins researchers in their study used posters of soda bottles with the headline “Did You Know That Working Off A Bottle Of Soda Or Fruit Juice Takes 50 Minutes Of Running?” Note that is says running, not walking. This is fairly strenuous exercise for most people and the prospect of doing an hour of it after every sugary indulgence puts some interesting perspective on the issue.

I like this approach not only because it proved to be more effective at actually modifying behavior, but also because, more importantly, it raises the issue of the way we think of exercise and weight loss. Quite often in the fitness industry, the message seems to be that if you work out hard enough you will lose weight and tone up, when the reality is that no matter how hard you work, you aren’t likely to do either if you fail to make any modifications in diet.

There are those who will tell you that their workouts will burn far more calories than what the Mayo Clinic or the Hopkins’ research study is listing. HIIT workouts, Tabata, Crossfit, Spin, Group Fitness, and others often tout their ability to help you burn upwards of 1,000 calories in a single workout, which may be true in some cases for some people. What they fail to mention is that even if that is true, you certainly would need to be doing this more than once or twice a week in order to compete with some of the calorie bombs that we come into contact with everyday.

The important message here is that we need to really stress the importance of making effective changes in diet if we want to see big results in health and fitness. Exercise is important for many reasons, such as strength, muscle balance, cardiovascular health, flexibility, metabolism, and many more, but it plays only a minor role when it comes to weight loss. I’d like to see the fitness industry own up to that fact a little bit more. There really is not a good reason for us to continually emphasize all of this calorie burn when there are so many other far more important quality of life benefits that deserve to be highlighted. Reduced chronic pain, extended independence and longevity, high levels of physical activity, and a longer time with high level engagement in life are more than enough reason to get into the gym. Although we often use the phrase “diet and exercise” most of the advertising emphasis in fitness revolves around the exercise – it should be the other way around. Too often we set people up to fail by promising that the pounds will melt off their bodies thanks to an exercise routine, and that does us all a disservice.