How Many Calories Will That Burn?
The New York Times has an interesting article entitled Exercise = Weight Loss, Except When It Doesn’t.
As you may guess the article explains why some exercises may yield less weight loss than one might expect.
One point raised is that if a particular exercise is supposed to burn 300 calories over a certain period of time, you must take into account how many calories you would expend simply by existing during that period and subtract that to see your real caloric deficit. This is the figure upon which you should base your weight loss expectation.
It’s a simple truth which I must admit had never occurred to me. How’s ’bout you?
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[...] + Exercise = Weight Loss, Except When It Doesn’t [NYT via Health-Hack] [...]
It is good that they bring attention to these facts. It is one of my pet peeves, that people think they can eat 200 extra calories if they ran for half an hour. Don’t do that! I do mention this in my calories/exercise calculator but it seems that most people just do not want to hear it.
I think it can be interesting to know that, for example, gardening burns more calories per half hour than ironing (as if you could not have guessed that), but in the end, you should just focus on being active, not on the exact amount of calories you burn by doing specific activities.
I heartily agree about being active. There is a metabolic advantage to that - if you are fit and active, you burn more calories at rest than you would if you were sedentary.
An active lifestyle was recently shown to help depression as well, which I believe is a major factor in causing obesity and sloth (thereby creating a vicious cycle).
Be well!
-Kevin