Cardio for fat burning only works with a Nutrition Plan

I was at the gym today and felt sad looking at the painful and desperate expressions on the faces of everybody running on the treadmills. I couldn’t help but think that most of them were getting absolutely nowhere with their fat loss programs simply because they are missing half of the picture.

Sure they were putting in some real effort in the gym and on the treadmill, but these people look the same week in and week out…I’m pretty sure they’re not in there doing all that work just because the love running on treadmills. I’ll bet any money they just want to lose weight, and specifically bodyfat. So is it just a waste of time for these people? I see them every day slugging away on those machines. So what are they missing?

In order to lose weight and burn off bodyfat you have to burn more calories than you consume. That is pretty simple math.

It would seem that there are two ways to do this:

1) Eat less food

2) Do more exercise

Still sounds pretty simple.

But this is where the confusion comes in.

Eating less food than you are currently eating requires you to find a way to account for all the food you eat on a daily basis. Without some sort of map or guide you will never really know how much food you are eating. (This is the whole point of our meal plans.)

On the other hand doing more exercise seems to be the right answer because there is no need to measure food, you simply just add in more exercise and voila, you should be losing weight in no time…right? WRONG!

Now, this is where the confusion really sets in.

Simply doing ‘more exercise’ isn’t as straight forward as it sounds for all of the following reasons:

1) More exercise can cause you to become tired and take more rest time and be less active throughout the rest of your day or possibly sleep longer. This effect of less activity throughout the rest of your day could easily offset the extra calories you burned during the workout.

2) Too much exercise might just make you more hungry and you may end up eating more food to compensate. It only takes a few bites of extra food at breakfast, lunch and dinner to erase any calorie burning you did at a workout.

3) Estimations of calories burned from workouts are usually way overestimated. Typical cardio machines can overestimate calorie burning by as  much as 30%.

4) Efficiency of exercise. The more you do a particular exercise the better you get at it, and the less calories it causes you to burn. (just think of how hard it was the first time you went for a run, and how easy that same distance was about 4 weeks later…the more efficient you get at things like running, the less calories it burns)

5) If you do lose weight from exercising you have to do more and more exercise to continue to lose weight because your body is getting lighter and lighter, and therefore you are doing less workout by moving around a smaller body. For example: if you weigh 170 pounds and go for a 5 km run you will burn approximately 380 calories (using the equation: 1 cal per km per kilogram of bodyweight)

But if you lose 20 pounds and you weigh 150 pounds that same 5 km run can only burn 340 calories (and probably even more like 300 as by this time you will be very efficient at running)

So, does cardio work or not?

Yes BUT, only if you have a handle on the amount of food you are eating each day. If the amount of food you are eating is constant and does not fluctuate up then yes cardio will definitely help with fat burning.

BUT, if you have no idea how much food you are eating, and no way of tracking it, then you could easily offset the calories burned from your workout by eating more food, or being less active throughout your day.

John

Our nutrition programs are a great way to eat real foods and keep track of all the calories you eat in a day. Get started here. www.empoweredmealplans.com