How do calories work? I bike 5 miles, I lose ~120-150 calories. But a small snack can be more than that?

Question

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

Answer 1

A calorie is a unit of energy. Food has calories; your body breaks up food and uses oxygen to “burn” it to get chemical energy that runs your body. You use about 1200 calories per day to “keep the lights on”, that is to power you heart, lungs, and brain to keep you alive. You use up that much just by being alive. The rest you burn through doing stuff — exercise, sure, but also walking around, doing puzzles, even eating requires some energy.

If you take in more calories than you can use, then the body tries to store some for later. First, we store calories in our liver as something called glycogen. If the liver is full up, we store most of the extra as fat (much harder to burn).

Sugar, starch, and protein has about 4 calories per gram of food, and fat has 9 calories per gram. However, only calories that come from sugar and starch are easily stored, and eating too much sugar can mess up the way the body manages sugar levels and energy storage in the body, so we tell people to lay off the sugar and starch (carbohydrates) especially.

It can be hard to control your calories, and exercise can be a difficult way to burn calories, but exercise has other health benefits and does burn calories, so it’s still a good idea. If you can reduce the amount of carbohydrate you consume and get regular exercise, you should have positive results. It simply doesn’t happen over-night, though, which discourages people.

Keep up the good work.