You don’t burn a great deal more calories exercising than you do just sitting on the couch.
Depends on how intense the exercise is, but it can easily be more than a factor of 3 times as much energy as sitting around (something like walking) to more than 10 times as much (things like vigorous cycling, running, etc). Would be really hard to maintain 20 times sitting output for any significant period of time though.
That’s serious athlete level of performance, though. And a result of that rigorous of exercise is an increased appetite, for obvious reasons.
Yes, freakish athletes like Micheal Phelps do exist, and intaking enough calories to fuel their workout is actually difficult. But for the regular humans just trying to lose weight, it’s far more effective to focus on calories than to focus on heavy exercise for 3+ hours a day.
What is serious athlete level of performance? 10x for at least 30 minutes/day seems pretty manageable for someone without significant medical conditions to work up to in a short period. Even if you eat back 80% of that, it can still lead to an equilibrium weight that’s like 20lb less.
I can’t believe the number of people on here who keep repeating that exercising can’t replace eating less… If you eat the same amount of calories as before but increase the calories you burn by 500 the result is the same as reducing how much you eat by 500 calories while maintaining the same daily needs. Heck, long term doing it through exercising is better for you as well!
Burning 500 extra calories working out is an extremely intense workout, especially considering how sedentary most people are.
The benefits are also short lived, you can burn some extra calories for a bit but your body will adjust, and after a while the number of calories you burn during a workout tapers off and you return to about the same number you were burning before.
This is a well documented phenomenon. Human bodies are really good at conserving energy.
You lose weight in the kitchen, you tone up in the gym.
That’s because your weight goes down so even at rest your daily needs are lower than they were before, you can still go a long way by just doing exercise you weren’t doing before and keeping the same diet.
Also, 500 extra calories isn’t that much if you’re doing cardio intensive exercises, that’s a 5 miles, jogging that’s under an hour at a very conservative pace, walking that’s two hours…
An estimated 1000 extra calories in about an hour for me is an extremely intense workout (the only time I estimated to have done that, my average heart rate during it was 173 - it was only based on HR and some basic data input like height and weight). I’m not a particularly active person and I’m overweight.
500 though? If you spread it out of 2 hours, its hardly anything at all. When I commuted by ebike daily, I was probably burning double that 6 days a week compared to driving and it felt very casual.
