Want to Lose Weight? Stop Counting Calories Burned from Exercise
I just did a Tik Tok on this and boy, was it controversial – especially when I’m the type of personal trainer to suggest, as long as your comfortable, that counting calories is the best way to ensure weight loss. And if that’s the case, then why am I now suggesting to stop counting calories burned from exercise? Before you decide to completely write me off as a hypocrite, let me explain.
How To Lose Weight
Before I dive in, I want to go over how weight loss works.
Your weight has a direct relationship with calories. Although often met with a negative connotation, a calorie is a unit of measurement that measures the amount of energy that is needed to raise the temperature of a kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. Put simply, the calories in your food are a measurement of how much energy your body could get from consumption. If we look at our food this way, it’s easier to see why the phrase “food is fuel” makes sense.
The amount of energy your body gets from the subunits depends on where they come from:
Carbohydrates: 4 calories per gram
Protein: 4 calories per gram
Fat: 9 calories per gram
Alcohol: 7 calories per gram
Weight loss occurs when you are in calorie deficit or negative energy balance, meaning, you are eating less than the calories you need to maintain your current weight (i.e., your maintenance calories). Conversely, weight gain happens when you are in a calorie surplus, or a positive energy balance. When you are eating in a calorie surplus, your body needs to put the extra energy somewhere and thus, some of that energy is stored as carbohydrates (glycogen) in your muscles and liver, and the rest will be stored as fat.3
You may have heard a phrase one pound of fat is equal to about 3500 calories. You may have also heard that weight loss of one pound per week can be achieved with a 3500 calorie deficit. But unfortunately, both are estimations. In fact, the eat at a ‘3500 calorie deficit each week’ (or a 500-calorie deficit per day) greatly overestimates the possible weight loss that can be accomplished.4
Calorie Expenditure
But you don’t just consume calories, you burn them off too – in quite a few ways. Although not the whole picture, let’s talk about calories and how it affects your metabolism. When reading this, it may make sense if you consider energy and calories synonymous. Your body’s energy expenditure can be broken down into these 4 categories:
REE – Resting Energy Expenditure – the energy required to keep your body functioning at rest. This energy is provided to the brain, kidney, lunges, heart, and nervous system.
EAT – Exercise Activity Thermogenesis– the energy your body requires for exercise
TEF – Thermal Effect of Food – the energy your body requires to digest food
1Fats raise the BMR 0–5 per cent.
Carbohydrates raise the BMR 5–10 per cent.
Proteins raise the BMR 20–30 per cent.
NEAT – Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis the energy your body requires to get your through your day-to-day activities
*Other factors your metabolism may be subject to are age, gender, muscle-to-fat ratio, amount of physical activity and hormone function 1
As described above, your maintenance calories are the calories needed to support your total energy expenditure.
How to Calculate Your Maintenance Calories
Here’s the most accurate calculation I can give you to figure out your maintenance calories for each day:
1. Start by Calculating Your Basal Metabolic Rate (RMR)2
Formula for Women
BMR (kcal / day)= 10 × weight (kg) + 6.25 × height(cm) – 5 × age (y) – 161 (kcal / day)
Formula for Men:
BMR (kcal / day) = 10 x weight (kg) + 6.25 x height (cm) – 5 x age (y) + 5 (kcal / day)
2. Multiply Your BMR By an Activity Level Factor To Get Your Maintenance Calories
1.2 is for little or no exercise
1.4 is for light exercise 1-2 times a week
1.6 is for moderate exercise 2-3 times/week
1.75 is for hard exercise 3-5 times/week
2.0 if you have a physical job or perform hard exercise 6-7 times/week
*Disclaimer- this calculation is still an estimate.
From there, you would eat less than your maintenance calories to be in a deficit. If you’d like more guidance on how to choose a sustainable deficit for weight loss, as well as some tips on how to stay full in calorie deficit, check out my free weight loss guide here!
Inaccuracy of Fitness Tracker
Ok great! You know the calories you’re going to eat each day but where does that leave the calories you burn? Well, that’s factored into the equation above. And I know what you’re thinking- how could that possibly be more accurate than my Apple Watch? Well although I can’t guarantee it’s more accurate, its certainly more conservative.
With the exception of patience, being conservative is a great virtue to have when it comes to weight loss. Generally speaking, we tend to underestimate the calories we consume and overestimate the calories we burn.
You see fitness trackers, such as the Apple Watch, have been proven to significantly over-estimate calories burned. In fact, a 2017 study conducted by Stanford University evaluated seven fitness devices, which included the Apple Watch, Basis Peak, Fitbit Surge, Microsoft Band, Mio Alpha 2, PulseOn and the Samsung Gear S2, and found that even the most accurate device was off by an average of 27 percent and the least accurate was off by 93 percent.5
Additionally, certain exercises, specifically cardio based type exercises (running, biking, HIIT, dance classes) tend to have a higher perceived rate of exertion, which simply means it feels like you are working harder than you actually are. This is based on the physical sensations a person experiences during physical activity, including increased heart rate, increased respiration or breathing rate, increased sweating, and muscle fatigue.6 Therefore, when you see a high amount of calories burned from your fitness tracker it seems totally believable.
And if that wasn’t enough to convince you – here’s one more reason. I don’t like fitness trackers and then subsequently, eating back calories burned from exercise because it gives the impression you need to “earn your food.” Remember that saying in the beginning of the article – “food is fuel;” well that saying goes out the window if you start looking to eat back the calories burned from your exercise. Also, while you’re scrolling up to the beginning of the article, take another look at the ‘Total Energy Expenditure’ graph (it’s a little small graph – I know). See the section for EAT, exercise activity thermogenesis. It looks pretty tiny doesn’t it? And that’s because for the majority of people in modern society, EAT is believed to be negligible.7 Now you can see why it’s all starting to make sense when people argue nutrition is the key to weight loss – not subtracting calories burned from your Orange Theory class.
What Can You Track To Ensure Weight Loss?
So if you can’t track your calorie expenditure from exercise, what can you track? Well, you can track calories from the food you eat.
Tracking every calorie from everything you eat could seem like a daunting task. In fact, there’s a good chance that when you first start off, there will be some error. Using these practices may help:
1) Use a food scale and set it to grams. I hate to break it to you but MyFitnessPal, and even nutrition labels, will never be as accurate as actually measuring out what you are eating for yourself and that’s because MyFitnessPal and nutrition labels are using estimates.
Why measure in grams? Grams helps to measure the actual weight of the food and is a smaller unit of measurement, making it easier to be precise.
2) Eat similar quantities of similar foods. This will save you less time measuring foods multiple times throughout the day and will give you a good estimate when a food scale is not available.
3) Eat mostly simple, one ingredient foods. It’s much easier to track the calories in strawberries than it is to track the calories in strawberry shortcake.
