Most of us believe that exercise is a great way to burn extra calories for fat loss goals. However, we tend to be less active throughout the rest of the day if we do strenuous exercise. This decrease may be very slight; for example less shifting around in your seat, less fidgeting, maybe one or two less trips up and down the stairs.

By the end of the day it can add up and represent a couple hundred less calories burned throughout the rest of the day. This will lower your daily energy expenditure simply because you are less active and erase some of the calorie deficit created with exercise.

For example: If you burn an extra 500 calories during an intense workout, but you end up having a nap and avoiding some housework and a short walk you would normally have done that day, you could easily end up right back where you started. You may just shift your normal daily calorie burn from household activities and running errands to a workout.

But the total amount of calories burned for the day could easily just end up the same, and even worse you might not get some important work done around the house or errands that you were planning on getting done.

This is not to suggest that you should never exercise (far from it) but it’s to ensure that you understand what exercise can and can’t do for weight loss. Now we will determine what the different kinds of exercise are and what they do.

There are many different forms of exercise that can be divided into two general categories:

1) “Cardio”

2) Resistance Training

Cardio

“Cardio” is slang for “Cardiovascular Exercise”. This is the type of exercise that is recommended for general health and strengthening the heart muscle. These days many people do cardio to lose weight and burn fat, but it’s important to realize that the original reason people did cardio training was for heart-health.

You can do cardio in many forms like:

Low intensity – walking, slow jog, biking.

Medium intensity – Jogging, biking, cross training, running, interval training High intensity – Usually in the form of intervals such as ‘sprint-walk-sprint’

This type of exercise can help improve health and conditioning but it will have a minimal effect on the shape of your muscles, in order to actually shape and grow your muscles you have to do some form of “Resistance Training”.

Resistance Training

Resistance training is different from ‘cardio’ because it requires you to lift much heavier weights and can only be done in short bursts for a few seconds at a time (this is what we call a ‘set’).

Resistance training can also incorporate all of the following styles in some form:

Weight Lifting – this includes bodybuilding, Powerlifting and Olympic style lifting

Bodyweight training – Push-ups, lunges, chin ups etc…

Resistance bands – You can get rubber bands with varying degrees of tension to perform all kinds of exercises to work the full body

Plyometrics – This is a very high intensity style of training based on jumping and ballistic movement

Resistance training is essential to building, shaping and tightening the muscles all around your body. This is important because your muscles are what give shape to your body, and you can change that shape with resistance training. This is a critical step that many people forget about when they are trying to lose weight and ‘get in shape’.

Once you’ve lost the weight and you’re sporting a new leaner body you will likely have a new sense of excitement and motivation to take your body to the next level. This is where a well designed resistance training program can help you shape your body and muscles into a that ‘beach body’ look that garners ooh’s and ahh’s from your friend on facebook when you post a new profile pic from the beach!

If you start a resistance training program you can build and shape all the muscles on your body into any form you want. This way you can take even more control of the look of your body when you’ve finally lost the weight. Underneath our fat is just muscle, so building and shaping that muscle is a critical step in getting into the final shape that you really want.

Here are a few training programs that I highly recommend:

If you are looking for weight lifting program, you can try John Barban’s Adonis Golden Ratio.

If you are interested in body weight training and / or body weight exercises then check out ‘Body Weight Burn‘ by Adam Steer.

Cardiovascular exercise is something you can gradually incorporate into your lifestyle as you progress. At the start you may not be able to handle it at all (or very little). I’ll be honest; it will most likely be really challenging until you’ve lost some initial weight. This is why I recommend starting with something with very low intensity like walking. If you feel like you’re not ready for cardio training, don’t worry; you can lose a significant amount of weight without exercising at all. Once you feel ready you can start slowly and build up over time. Your cardiovascular endurance and strength will build up much faster than you think once you start exercising.

I have worked with people who have lost between 80-100lbs, some of them didn’t do any exercise until they lost the first 50-60lbs simply because they didn’t feel they were ready yet. And this is an extremely important point I need to make – cardio training is not essential for weight loss. In fact, depending on how much weight you have to lose it may actually be a detriment to your weight loss efforts. So it’s really up to you. Some people enjoy doing exercise and jump right into a resistance training program mixed with some cardio, others like to wait until they feel ready.

It’s really up to you to decide if/when you want to add in exercise. I can say that almost everyone who has lost a significant amount of weight eventually started to add in exercise to their lifestyle simply because it started to feel good to get up and move around more. This is something you’ll have to discover for yourself, but I’m sure at some point sooner or later you’ll likely just want to start moving.

For ‘cardio’ I only do low intensity stuff like walking and some elliptical machine work. I just go to the gym and zone out watching tv for an hour or so while I’m walking.  For a weight training program I follow the Adonis Index workout as it’s designed for my exact goal of getting the best shaped body possible.

Both ‘cardio’ and resistance training have numerous health benefits and are what I would consider essential to a ‘healthy’ lifestyle. If you have a capable body and mind, I see no reason that you shouldn’t partake in both at some point.

BUT, and this is a big BUT, as I said before – neither of them are essential for you to lose weight!

This is a big distinction I’m making right here.

You can lose weight without doing any exercise at all. And in fact it’s not even advisable for people with a lot of weight to lose to even attempt exercising until they’re at a manageable weight to start doing so (I’m talking about people who have 100lbs to lose or more). Now I know you’ve probably seen television shows that have people weighing almost 400 pounds doing intense exercise sessions, but I’m guessing they have doctors and paramedics on site at all times – something most regular people probably don’t have at their gyms.

It would appear that the more weight you have to lose the easier it will be to simply focus on diet to take off the first big chunk of weight. For people with approx 70lbs or more to lose it seems easier to focus solely on diet at the beginning for three reasons.

1)        If you’ve never worked out before it’s difficult to start two new things at once (diet + exercise) and manage them both. It’s much easier to focus on one thing (diet) and master it before you take on the challenge of starting a workout program as well.

2)        If you have more than 70lbs to lose you might find it very difficult to start any kind of workout program simply because of the physical limitation of your current body size. A workout program might be too much for your system to handle until you lose some initial weight.  Going for a walk when you 70lbs overweight is much more difficult than when you’re only 20-30lbs overweight.

3)        For some people exercise may distract them from the real issue of eating less. People will try to exercise the weight off without changing their dietary habits. This almost always ends in failure as we’ve already discussed with the calorie compensation effect and rest compensation effect of exercise.

For people with more than approx 70lbs to lose it’s perfectly fine to cut the first 20-40lbs with diet alone. Once this initial weight is lost you will have built some momentum and feel very good both physically and mentally and then you can start incorporating exercise to help you get rid of the final 20-30lbs. You’ll likely find that it’s much easier to start working out with a lighter body than when you were at your heaviest.

In fact, if you’re new to working out and you try to workout too soon, it might sour you to the idea of working out all together because it’s going to feel much more difficult when you’re heavy than when you’re lighter. The last thing you want to do is start a workout program and hate it. Exercising should feel good, so you need to be in the right mindset when you start a new program. The following picture is a much better way to view how dieting and exercise fit together for your overall weight loss, health and body shape.

This is a much more accurate way to view what diet and both forms of exercise (cardio and resistance training) can do for weight loss, getting in shape, and improving your overall health.

The bottom Line

Exercise can be used to build and shape your muscles, and improve your overall health, but it’s not essential for weight loss. If you want to use exercise then by all means add it in (and I really encourage you to do so), but if you really don’t want to, don’t worry.

If you listen to what some experts have to say, you’d think your metabolic rate is the end all be all of health and weight loss. However, just like everything else the truth is a lot more boring than you’d think.

Your metabolic rate is simply the amount of calories you burn on a daily basis to support the regular functioning of your body. There are different ways to measure it but the most common and the one that is most applicable for you is called your Resting Metabolic Rate or RMR for short.

Your RMR is the amount of calories you burn just sitting around relaxing and not exercising. This doesn’t include walking or moving around or working out, it doesn’t even include fidgeting. It’s just the amount of energy you burn up sitting around doing nothing. Unfortunately for many people this describes their activities every day.

So how do you calculate your RMR?

Well we can’t calculate it exactly without multiple trips to a scientific lab, so the best we can do is an estimate (and scientists are still just learning what average resting metabolic rates might even be).

Let me repeat that, the best we can do is ESTIMATE your RMR. Any metabolic rate calculator you find online is just an estimate, and many of them are way off and in need of a serious update.

In research done by Amanda C et al in 2010 the RMR of 47 women was measured and compared it to the popular RMR estimator equations. The average RMR for this group of women was 1027 calories per day. The average height of the group was 5’5.

Interestingly the predictive equations all overestimated RMR, and the worst one (harris benedict) overestimated by 700 calories! It’s tough to hear it, but we all just need to eat way less calories than we’ve been led to believe.

One of the major areas where popular online metabolic rate/calorie burn calculators breakdown is when they add in their ‘activity factor’ calculation. Most of these calculators overestimate the amount of calories we can burn from activity.

This is because the research they are basing their equations on is very old and outdated. These outdated activity factor equations were done on people who were much more active than we are today (think full time lumberjacks).

METABOLIC RATE – Getting rid of some erroneous Myths

You’ve probably been led to believe that lean people have high metabolism, and that most overweight people have slow metabolism. Turns out this is a major false assumption. It’s just flat out wrong.

In further research done by Ravussin et al in 1982 it was shown clearly that the obese people actually had higher resting metabolic rates than the lean control group.

The average metabolic rate of the obese people was measured at approximately 1800 calories per day as compared to 1450 calories per day for the normal weight control group (and the obese group was actually shorter on average than the controls so we would guess based on height that their metabolic rate should have been lower if all other things were equal).

The difference in metabolic rate was because the obese people actually had an average of 30lbs more total Fat Free body Mass than the lean people. This doesn’t mean they had 30lbs more ‘muscle mass’, but rather more of everything including organ mass, bone mass, and residual tissue mass (of which a small amount might have been muscle tissue).

This leads perfectly into another false assumption about your metabolic rate – that your muscles are the biggest contributors to how many calories you burn in a day.

It turns out that out of all these tissues the ones that contribute the greatest proportion to your metabolic rate are your internal organs.

Research by Muller et al, In 2011 shows that not only do your internal organs contribute the largest portion to your metabolic rate but that they scale to the height of your body and to the overall size of your body. In other words, the taller you are and the bigger you are the bigger your internal organs are and thus the more calories they burn.

The following is a list of the relative amount of energy each tissue contributes to your daily metabolic rate per poundof each tissue (data from Bosy-Westphal et al 2009):

Heart = 200 cals/lbs

Kidney = 200 cals/lbs

Brain = 110 cals/lbs

Liver = 90 cals/lbs

Muscle = 6 cals/lbs

Fat = 2 cals/lbs

Bone = 1 cals/lbs

As you can see from this data, your heart, kidneys, liver and brain are the most highly metabolically active tissues in your body and as you will find out they actually contribute the most to your metabolic rate. Muscle is actually much closer to fat when it’s at rest, it really doesn’t burn many calorie when you’re not working out.

Research by Heymsfield et al. in 2002 indicates that approximately 69% of your resting metabolic rate comes from your internal organs (specifically the combination of your heart, liver, kidneys, and brain). The other 31% comes from your bones, muscle, and fat tissue.

I’m presenting this research to show you that striving to add extra muscle isn’t going to increase your resting metabolic enough to change how many calories you can eat to lose weight. I’m also showing you that your metabolic rate is likely lower than you were lead to believe.

There is one final false assumption we have to discuss and that’s the effect of exercise on your metabolic rate. Now, let me say right here that exercise is one of the best ways to control how many calories you burn in any given day.

There are hundreds of research papers and dozens of textbooks on this topic. There are also dozens of metabolic rate calculators online and equations in textbooks that will suggest an ‘activity factor’ that suggest you can burn anywhere from 500 to 2000 extra calories per day just by being active.

In all cases these are best guesses, and I’d say rather optimistic guesses in many cases… you’ve got to be super mega active to actually burn 2000 extra calories in a day! For example if you weighed approximately 175lbs you would need walk for approximately 6 hours to burn 2000 calories.

Or you would need to do approximately 3 and half hours if high intensity interval training. In both cases I’m pretty sure you already shaking your head thinking ‘no way’. And you would be right. This would be total insanity to attempt to burn 2000 calories in a day. Heck even 1000 extra calories would take hours and hours of exercise.

In fact, we cross referenced the actual measured true calorie burn for various activities and exercise from scientific research and compared it to what most metabolic rate and activity calculators suggest.

What we found out was that most calculators grossly overestimate daily calorie burn for most people. This is because the metabolic rate calculators are assuming that an ‘active’ person is doing MULTIPLE hours of activity EVERY DAY, not just a 45 minute workouts 2-3 times per week.

The truth is that most of us don’t even do 1 hour of vigorous activity per day let alone multiple hours. In most cases the only excess calories we will burn in any given day is due to a scheduled workout…and if you don’t even do that, well you are sedentary plain and simple.

If you sit at a desk all day, and do little or no exercise then you are sedentary by any definition. This means that you should click the ‘sedentary’ option every time you attempt to use any online metabolic rate calculator.

Your workout and your nutrition routine will become part of your identity…but they should never become your entire identity.

You may notice that advocates of various styles of dieting or exercise begin to take it on as the main driving factor of their personal identity.

Veganism, “Paleo”, Low Carb, Vegetarianism, Runners, Powerlifters, Triathletes etc.

These can become all consuming identities that take over the persons life even if they never intended to become such an advocate when they first tried it out.

If you enjoy running and you do it often, that is great, but that doesn’t mean that running is who you are, it’s just one of the things you do.

If you like vegetarian food great, but that doesn’t mean that vegetarianism should define you as a person.

These are all just choices you make.

In most cases these choices start off benign and usually in the name of achieving better health and a better physical condition…and lets face it, to lose weight. Nobody does any of this stuff assuming they’re going to stay the same weight or gain weight!

But if you’re not careful they can become a cult like phenomenon where you feel like you only belong and only have worth if you grip tighter and tighter to these identities and let them become entirely who you think you are.

Some people will go as far as to disown long standing friends just because they haven’t adopted the same diet and exercise identity.

This is clearly an example of taking things too far.

Yes exercise and nutrition can and will become part of your identity, but only a part. You are much more than how you exercise and eat.

No matter what exercise and diet identities you associate with, make sure you are in control if it, instead if it being in control of you.