Trying to lose weight and putting it in numbers is demoralizing. I’ve started riding a stationary bike for 5 miles and then doing minor weight lifting after and I maaaaybe lose 200 or so calories. Is that not a good exercise? I’ve been doing this almost everyday starting 2 weeks ago. But it’s starting to feel useless if it’s such a minor amount of calories burnt. Is this a good trend to continue? What am I missing?
Edit: everyone here has been incredibly helpful, and surprisingly consistent with one another. I feel much more confident about what I’m doing and what I need to do. Seriously, thank you all.
In: 209
Welcome to an understanding of energy and quite how much the human body does all day long. (I’m going to use the terms force, energy, power, etc. interchangeably, so physicists now recoil in horror… plus I’m gonna mix and interchange units like nobody’s business!).
You’re using energy all the time, all day, every waking – and sleeping – moment of your life. Just existing is “burning calories”. Whatever your exercise it has a certain amount of mass (weight) moving a certain distance, and that in very simple physics gives you a certain usage of energy. Whether that’s you pushing weights, walking, running, cycling, or whatever, it’s really quite simple to work out what you’re going to use up on an activity.
And, yes, it doesn’t *seem* very much at all. Because it’s not. Your food is incredibly rich source of chemical energy and your body incredibly efficient at processing it and is carrying around 70kg of person all the time so even moving your leg is moving maybe 10kg of you around.
And so when you’re exercising, instead of the “just existing” energy usage, you’re using your exercise energy usage instead. It’s not that the exercise is magically 200 calories over and above everything, it’s 200 calories compared to – approximately – 80 calories per hour that you’re expending ALL THE TIME anyway, just sitting there breathing.
Have a look:
[https://www.calculator.net/bmr-calculator.html](https://www.calculator.net/bmr-calculator.html)
But the fact is… you were burning those 80 calories per hour in your sleep, before you ever did exercise, etc. etc. Your body heat, your brain operation, just moving around, speaking, talking, breathing. The body takes in an incredible amount of energy and just moving your lungs and pumping your blood and heating your body and running your brain take enormous amounts of energy, let alone when you then transport 70kg for miles around your daily life just getting to work.
80kcal – an hour of sedentary activity – is 334,720J or 93Wh. About enough to light an energy-saving bulb for a day. But also the same energy as picking up a small tomato to 1m high 330,000 times (or over 3 times a second for an entire day). It would take a single hard boiled egg to give your body that amount of energy. The body is incredible, and food is very rich!
So when you do your exercise, your food is INCREDIBLY rich in energy, your body is burning an awful lot of energy just to exist anyway, and your exercise difference of doing thousands of repetitions ON TOP of that background consumption is actually not very much in total energy terms.
Rather than get bogged down in the numbers, though, there’s a very simple truth here. Whatever you base metabolic rate, whatever your diet, whatever your exercise – if you are trying to lose weight and are eating 2000 calories a day and exercising 200 calories a day… and you’re still putting on weight or not losing it fast enough? You have to reduce your eating and/or increase your activity. That’s all there is to it. Try 1900 calories of food and 250 calories of exercise for a week. If you’re still not losing? Adjust again. And once you get a slow, gradual loss… you need to stick with that for a long time (going “more” is probably unhealthy and subjecting you to exhaustion and malnutrition). You need to do more and eat less on a week-by-week basis until you discover the point at which you start to lose weight, and then maintain that for a long time – a year or more. Then, when you’re done, you need to eat and exercise to the break-even point, on average. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a burger, it means you have to maintain the average over a period of months.
A thing that many people don’t realise about exercising – your “weight loss” is generally through your breath. (“If you lose 10 pounds of fat, precisely 8.4 pounds comes out through your lungs and the remaining 1.6 pounds turns into water.”) You eat and excrete the same as ever, the energy is used in motion and heat but the actual loss *weight* loss is done mostly through your lungs. You’re losing weight out through your breath. It’s not quick or easy to do that – convert solid fat to liquid gas and then exhale it all. That’s why losing weight is really difficult.
“I’ve been doing this almost everyday starting 2 weeks ago. But it’s starting to feel useless if it’s such a minor amount of calories burnt”
2 weeks is nothing. Absolutely nothing. Sorry, you won’t see much change at all on that kind of scale. And the exercise is comparatively little, yes. That’s true of all exercise. That exercise isn’t even 10% of your DAILY intake of energy.
Calories are strange things in that food has LOTS of calories, and those calories give LOTS of energy, meaning that to work off even an egg is comparatively a ton of exercise. That’s why much of losing weight is not putting that food into the body in the first place.
But if you want to lose weight, you have to look at months and years, not days, weeks and individual meals / exercises.
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