Previously I talked about calories in. Now we need to talk about calories out. There is tremendous pressure on us to exercise to lose weight, and as I said previously,  that really didn’t work well for me – and it doesn’t for many people!

Marathon Mess

In 2007 I took up running, after I had shifted much of my weight and stopped smoking. I set my sights on the London Marathon! A huge goal at the time, but it was 18 months away, which I thought was plenty of time to get myself prepared and get to training…

BUT, what then happened was I started putting all that weight back on again…

I was doing all this running and conditioning my body to deal with this marathon of an event (pardon the pun), but I would just get more hungry! I would think “It’s okay to eat all this food, I’ve run all these miles and the fitness tracker’s telling me I’ve burned all these calories”.

If you equate 1-mile of running to about 100 calories, doing a 20-mile run should have burned approximately 2000 calories, so surely I can eat whatever I like – but no… this is where the quality of the food comes in.

The crisps and chocolates and doughnuts and all the other ultra tasty, but ultra processed sweet treats are packed with calories. All those calories burned were now replenished post-exercise as I felt like I had “earned” them. And of course, the weight came piling back on.

Seeing this increase in weight, I would try to cut back calories, all while ramping up the training in preparation for my goal. But as I’ve previously mentioned, trying to do strenuous exercise while cutting back on calories is like running through treacle – which is only going to hinder our commitment to exercise.

Being determined to get the miles and not fuelling properly, I’d end up starving hungry and that just resulted in bingeing.

Those 18 months came and went, and by the time I turned up at the London Marathon in April 2009, I had put on over three stone.

I tried to do the marathon after having been overtraining and under-fuelling my body; I ended up on that start line not in a good place. I ended up with bursitis in both hips after completing the marathon and it took me six months to pick up distance running again.

Bursitis is essentially inflammation of a mechanism in our joints (bursae) that help reduce friction during impact.

Consistent overtraining while underfeeding (that’s underfeeding of nutrients essential for muscle and connective tissue recovery) does not allow sufficient recovery of joint mechanics in response to strenuous training. Usually due to inefficient protein intake, not allowing for the available substrate for tissue recovery within the muscle and surrounding joints (1). In hindsight I can see it all so clearly!

 

Painful Lessons

That six months of pain taught me a very valuable lesson about this ‘eat less move more’ philosophy – if I want to do significantly more exercise, I will need to support that through my diet, rather than thinking I could eat as much of anything as I liked or cutting back and feeling like exercise is ten times harder.

I realised I needed to cycle between eating less and moving more, ensuring I was properly fueled during times of strenuous exercise, but cutting back on the exercise when I was focusing on losing weight by cutting back the calories.

Now this was a turning point for me.

In addition to my formal training that I did since then, what helped me fully make sense of this was the book “Burn” by Herman Ponzter. I’ve mentioned his book before, as it helped me understand what was happening to me. He explains how we have what is known as a ‘constrained metabolism’.

This is the idea that with increased exercise, we will burn more calories. But after a while, our bodies adapt to what we’re trying to do. Remember, our bodies are focused on survival. They want us to conserve our energy rather than burning it. So, they fight back with very strong signals telling you that you are hungry, so eat more; and that you are tired, so rest more.

This can have knock-on effects on different bodily functions. Pretty much every function of the body requires burning energy to perform its tasks. Herman breaks down these different energy-demanding processes.

Studies on constrained metabolism have shown that our bodies will reduce its energy expenditure on other, more important, functions if we’re forcing it into movement when it doesn’t have the nutritional resources to support it (2). This can trigger increased feelings of fatigue, which can end up counteracting the extra exercise, thus preventing us from losing weight. The trick really is about figuring how you can get the right amount of exercise and the right amount of energy to support your goals – which will be the focus of a future article.

 

Fitness Slackers

This is why focusing on burning excessive calories through exercise is not helpful in the long run. Short term, it may feel good to observe how many calories your fitness tracker is telling you that you’ve burned. But the problem is those trackers have no real idea how your own body works. The only real way to find out how many calories you’ve burned is to go into a lab, wear a mask and measure how many respiratory byproducts are exhaled (3).

Fitness trackers are based on averages. Averages collected over many different people over the years. They come up with a best guess for your age, height, current weight and gender. What they don’t take into account is what your body is doing when it’s not exercising (4).

Out of your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE), the calories used during purposeful exercise is the smallest proportion of energy usage. Up to 70% comes from your resting metabolic rate (the rate your body burns energy when you’re doing nothing). This is mostly influenced by the amount of lean, fat-free tissue we have. Therefore, the more muscle we have, the higher our resting metabolic rate will be.

However, building muscle takes a considerable amount of time and effort, so cannot be an immediate solution. But increasing our lean muscle mass can increase how much energy we burn whilst doing nothing – a useful little trick to help keep our weight (or fat mass really) under control (5).

 

Ignore the calories burned!

Lifting weights in the gym burns calories mostly through the recovery of the muscles post-exercise as they need energy to repair and grow. But counting these calories we ‘burned’ through exercise can really screw with our success. Not only from being most likely wrong, but tricking us into thinking we can eat more, and of poorer quality food, as we feel we deserve to treat ourselves. We need to steer away from this mindset, and the easiest solution is to ignore the calories burned altogether!

If we explore TDEE some more, we know 70% comes from resting metabolic rate. Another 15% comes from your non-purposeful exercise, essentially all the movement our bodies do in everyday life: walking about, going up and down stairs, fidgeting. Now, obviously, the percentages will be different for different people.

Someone who is pretty much sedentary all day working an office job is going to burn way less calories than someone who has a very active job. But if we’re getting up, moving around, walking to the shops, just moving in our daily life, then we’re going to be hitting closer to that 15%, therefore burning more calories.

A further 10% comes from the thermic effect of food, which is how much energy the digestion process needs to break down food into its nutrient components for us to absorb.

And finally, the last 5% is from intentional exercise (6) – the smallest part of our energy demands!

With this information, getting anxious about ‘needing’ to spend hours in the gym to burn off those extra pounds, we now know it’s not going to make much of a difference. Yes, it will make you fitter, which is vital for good health. But in terms of calorie usage and fat loss, it has the smallest effect, and is likely going to make you tired and stressed if you overdo it.

Now let’s talk about Fitness Trackers. I used to have a Fitbit. I also have a Garmin. Over the years I’ve tried many different trackers, and they are great at giving us motivation for being consistent with our activity and tracking what we’re doing.

However, a big issue is their accuracy in terms of calories burned.

We need to shift our mindset from thinking our tracker has told us we’ve earned 600 calories in exercise today, now it doesn’t matter if I go over my calories as I’ve got 600 spare.

But your tracker doesn’t know what you’re doing the rest of the day. Your tracker doesn’t know your body may be slowing down other functions to compensate for your exercise.

You may think you’ve earned an extra 600 calories, but the overall net effect might be 300 due to the decreased activity. If you go over your daily calorie goal by 400 calories, you end in a 100 calories surplus for the day.

All the while thinking you’re in a deficit, but actually you may not be. So, we can help solve this by ignoring the calories burned figure and sticking to your daily calorie intake goal.

 

Still eat well!

Now this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t adjust your diet dependent on the amount of exercise you are doing. You still need to make sure you’re fueling your body for exercise and recovery. Whatever calorie deficit you give yourself, you need to make sure it’s not set too low. If your doing consistent exercise, you will get tired and you will get hungry, which will lead to you just eating back the calories lost.

Therefore, my advice is to ignore the calories your fitness tracker is telling you that you’ve burned. Now you could use a calorie estimator online. These daily energy expenditure calculators take information on your weight, height and how much you want to lose and then will tell you what calories you need to hit.

But this tends to put you in a position that cannot be sustained.

Try tracking the calories from the food you are currently consuming and track your weight alongside. If your weight stays the same, you know you’re at maintenance calories. If it goes up, you’re in a surplus, and down, you’re in a deficit.

Then you can hone in on the right amount of calories for your goal that is sustainable to follow and you’re now not making any drastic changes. If you end up losing weight too quickly, you’re probably cutting yourself short on some much-needed nutrition – all the minerals and vitamins our bodies need.

It’s extremely hard to follow good nutrition on a large calorie deficit, unless we’re following a specific diet that has taken care of that for us.

So, the overall message is to keep our fitness tracker calories-burned figure separate from our calories-in figure. That way you are much more likely to stay on track, and much more likely to ensure you’re eating enough to support your goal without overdoing it; or end up so hungry you eat back all the calories and more.

 

Keep it simple and separate!

Fitness trackers as a whole aren’t bad. I use my Apple Watch currently, I record all my activity on it, and I love it. I will regularly look at it, checking how far I ran or how fast, how long I spent weight training, how far did I walk into town, etc.

My overall calorie burning goal is built into the watch. I may be looking at that energy goal, but I do not associate that with meaning I have earned calories back – I keep them separate.

That is just a target for me to make sure I’ve been moving around enough each day. If my goal is 600 calories for movement and I’m only on 200, it will tell me that I’ve not been very active and perhaps I need to get up and move.

We still need to be aware of the exercise we’ve done, break down how long we exercised and at what intensity – but using the comparison of calories in and our weight measurements.

We ignore the calorie burn as its absolutely meaningless other than how it compares from one day to the next.

It doesn’t tell us anything meaningful. I know if I’ve worked really hard, if I’ve ran a long way, I will be more tired and I will be less active for the rest of the day. Sitting on the sofa, watching TV, instead of moving about, doing the housework, essentially just doing less as my body is making me rest to recover.

Can you see how the overall figure becomes meaningless if you’re less active later in the day and our fitness trackers do not know? Yes, they monitor our biofeedback, such as our heart rate and what not. But they are unable to look inside our body and see what’s happening with our metabolism – that’s impossible!

Keeping things simple and separate we are more likely to be able to get the calories in right. Keep an awareness of our daily activity and make sure we’re moving for good health.

It’s super-important that, if we are trying to lose a bit of weight, we’re not overdoing the exercise as we could end up undoing all our hard work.

Need help figuring all this out? Then you’re not alone. The fact that so many people struggle with this shows how difficult it is… and that’s why I am here to help you with my one to one weight loss coaching and my weight loss accountability club.

So why not book a call and have a chat about how I can help you.

Claire x

With thanks to contributing author James Jones PT

Claire Jones is a multi-award-winning Sustainable Weight Loss Coach, Mentor, Therapist, Speaker and Author of the popular book “How To Eat Less”. She helps people learn how to manage their weight well for life.

With a career background of over 25 years spanning the NHS, HM Prison Service, and the UK Fire Service, she has seen first-hand what happens when people don’t look after their health, and has a natural desire to help and to serve those in need.

However, it was after overcoming decades of yo-yo dieting and learning how to look after her own health, that she found a particularly unique way to be of service.

She realised she had found an effective, unique and sustainable solution to the weight loss and regain cycles that so many go through, that cripples their confidence and holds them back from the lives they really want.

She is known for her relatable, down-to-earth manner and for helping her clients finally crack the code to their healthy weight and happiest selves.

 

References and Further Reading

 

1) The impact of step reduction in muscle health in ageing: Protein and exercise as countermeasures – Oikawa, S. Y., et al. (2019)

• “protein malnutrition may act to synergistically accelerate sarcopenia declines and thus increase the risk for subsequent hospitalization or disuse resulting in accelerated muscle loss”
• https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2019.00075/full

 

2) Constrained total energy expenditure and metabolic adaptions to physical activity in adult humans – Pontzer, H., et al. (2016).

• “Constrained total energy expenditure model, in which total energy expenditure increases with physical activity at low activity levels but plateaus at higher activity levels as the body adapts to maintain total energy expenditure within a narrow range”
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4803033/

 

3) Normal weight men and women overestimate exercise energy expenditure – Willbond, S. M., et al. (2010).

• “results suggest that normal weight individuals overestimate EE during exercise by 3-4 folds. Further, when asked to precisely compensate for exercise EE with food intake, the resulting energy intake is still 2 to 3 folds greater than the measured EE of exercise”.
• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21178922/

 

4) Fitness Trackers accurately measure heart rate but not calories burned – Dusheck, J. (2017)

• “The energy expenditure measures were way off the mark. The magnitude of just how bad they were surprised me”.
• https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2017/05/fitness-trackers-accurately-measure-heart-rate-but-not-calories-burned.html

 

5) Control of energy expenditure in humans – Westerterp, K. R. (2016).

• “Energy expenditure in humans is determined by body size and body composition, environment and behavior. A larger body, especially a larger fat-free mass, requires more maintenance and thus induces a higher basal metabolic rate or resting energy expenditure”
• https://www.nature.com/articles/ejcn2016237#:~:text=Energy%20expenditure%20in%20humans%20is,rate%20or%20resting%20energy%20expenditure.

 

6) Metabolic adaption to weight loss: Implications for the athlete – Trexler, E. T., et al. (2014)

• Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) figure
• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260397860_Metabolic_adaptation_to_weight_loss_Implications_for_the_athlete/figures?lo=1