How to burn more Calories, Lose Weight and Feel Great ... EXPLAINED
If you have the goal of losing weight or reducing body fat…
Whether that’s for health reasons or simply to look and feel at your best!
We have to create a calorie deficit.
There are 2 ways to create one…
- Consume Less Calories.
Burn more calories.
Burning more calories is therefore an important part of weight management.
When we think to burn more calories, we may simply think we need to “move more” …
But is that all there is to it?
To answer that question, we need to understand how our body burns calories across the course of a day!
Let’s start there.
TDEE - Total Daily Energy Expenditure aka. Calorie burnt in a day
TDEE is our total daily energy expenditure.
(Here is a chart showing it)
Source: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Components-of-total-daily-energy-expenditure-TDEEBMRbasal-metabolic-rate_fig1_260397860
The amount of calories we burn in a day is actually comprised of 4 main areas.
(BMR, NEAT, TEF, EAT)
That’s a lot of acronyms…
Which may make this chart seem confusing at first glance.
So I’m going to simplify these 4 areas and give you some practical ways to improve each one.
BMR - Basal Metabolic Rate aka. Our metabolism!
Simply being alive… Burns calories.
There are countless processes happening in our body all the time, like our hearts beating, lungs breathing and even thinking.
All of these activities require energy in order to be performed and keep our body alive.
I’ve heard BMR referred to as “coma calories” , which is a really simple way to think about it.
If you went into a coma, and didn’t move at all…
There would still be a certain amount of calories your body needed to burn just to keep you alive.
Our Metabolism is determined by a few different factors, some we have no control over such as…
- Gender.
- Age.
- Genetics.
But there is one key factor in determining our metabolism that we do have control over… which is.
Lean body mass.
Or in other words, the amount of muscle we have.
It requires a lot of energy to maintain muscle, so having more lean mass will increase our calorie burn each day.
How much of a calorie burn is our metabolism responsible for in a day?
Our metabolism is responsible for 70% of our total daily energy expenditure… WHICH IS HUGE.
This is one reason why Resistance Training is the most beneficial way to lose fat.
We train… so we maintain or even build some muscle.
That muscle burns more calories even when we’re at rest.
Which helps us to more easily create a calorie deficit to start losing body weight and specifically body fat.
So…
Whether male, female, young or old… we should all have an interest in increasing or at least maintaining the amount of muscle we have.
This will play a significant role in increasing our metabolism.
NEAT - Non Exercise Activity Thermogenosis aka Moving More Each Day
The second largest area of calorie burn each day comes from our general movement.
E.g. cleaning the house, walking round the shops or taking the stairs.
Our general movement in a day is responsible for roughly 15% of our daily calorie burn.
That being said…
We can dramatically increase our calories burnt throughout a day by making efforts to move more.
This doesn’t exactly sound sexy.
It doesn’t sound as good as a 20 minute Fat-Torching HIIT workout.
But the percentage of calorie burn from your movement across the 14 hours you’re awake in a day is significantly higher than 20 minutes of training.
So this is a huge area of focus for members of Fitness Studio 46.
There are some very individual and unique ways that people can increase their movement.
One client used to make a practice of walking up and down every isle in the supermarket when she would go to get her lunch, as oppose to just walking straight to the isle she needed.
This doesn’t sound like much.
But when you add that additional movement up across a week, a month, a year or even years!!
That’s a huge amount of calories burnt.
My suggestion is to look at your day and try to identify ways to increase your movement.
Make movement part of your daily habits and routines.
TEF - Thermic Effect of Food aka. Calories burnt by eating!
When we eat… it requires energy to digest the food!
Which sounds great right.
“Eat more to burn more calories!”
But don’t get too excited, as it’s only responsible for about 10% of our calorie burn for a day.
However…
If we’re focusing on keeping our metabolism high and therefore making efforts to maintain our lean mass, we’ll have to be eating more protein!
And conveniently, protein has the highest thermic effect.
So eating more protein is a WIN WIN.
Not only is it helping to maintain lean muscle mass, which keeps our metabolism high.
It also requires the most energy to be digested, which burs more calories.
Increasing protein intake, then, is very important.
There is also research to suggest that:
Physically active people benefit from increased TEF.
Eating earlier in the day increases TEF.
EAT - Exercise Activity Thermogenosis aka. Calories burnt through exercise
This is the area that most people tend start with when wanting to increase their calorie burn…
But Exercise is responsible for only 5% of our daily calorie burn*
obviously this number could increase if you were to spend a considerable portion of your day exercising, perhaps if you were athlete, but for most of us that’s just not the case.
Here leads us to a big adjustment in mindset!
We shouldn’t be judging the effectiveness of a workout based on the amount of calories it burns!
I’ll say that again….
We shouldn’t be judging the effectiveness of a workout based on the amount of calories it burns!
… 95% of our daily calorie burn comes from other factors.
Therefore it would be wise to invest most of our energy on increasing our metabolism, moving more throughout the day and eating a high protein diet!
So what makes for a successful workout?
Our biggest determining factor of our calorie burn … is our metabolism.
It would be far more beneficial to spend your training time devoted to building / maintaining muscle mass…
To do that, we need to be resistance training.
We should also be using resistance training to increase our joint strength and movement ability, in an effort to avoid getting injured!!
… Injury is the fastest way to bring our calorie burn to a grinding halt.
My advice is therefore pretty straight - forward.
We need to base the success of a workout on how much better it makes us… not calories burnt.
In Summary
If you’re interested in weight management to improve how we look, move and feel.
Our calorie burn is an important factor to consider.
We burn calories in 4 different ways during a day (in percentage order) :
Metabolism
Movement
Digesting Food
Exercising
The 3 things that you need to focus on to burn the most calories are …
Resistance Training
Moving as much as possible each day
Eating a high protein diet
Not only will this help create a calorie deficit and manage your weight.
You will look, move and feel at your absolute best!!
Yours in coaching,
Harry