Exercise and Calories: Reality Check
WebMD has a nice little online feature: the Fit-O-Meter, which calculates the calories burned for 600 different activities. You pick the activity, plug in your weight and the duration, and voila: you get an estimate of the number of calories you’ve burned.
There are a few caveats, of course…for one thing, this sort of calculator can’t account for the metabolic benefits of exercise (such as improvements in insulin sensitivity, or post-workout elevations in RMR) that also influence weight/fat loss. And – of course – there’s no way to factor individual variation into the equation (body composition, gender, hormones, etc.). Nonetheless, the Fit-O-Meter provides a good reality check on how exercise can either a) benefit your fat loss efforts; or b) inadvertently sabotage them.
What say??? Sabotage???
Yup…Sabotage. The reality is that many people overestimate the number of calories burned during an activity. If I walked at a moderately brisk pace for a full hour (221 cals), for example, all it would take is a medium-sized bagel (289 cals – no butter or cream cheese) to put me back into the red. And even an hour of playing tennis (465 cals) isn’t enough to compensate for piece of apple pie a la mode (582 cals – and that’s with only one small scoop of regular ice cream).
In other words, exercise isn’t “written permission” to indulge, unfortunately.
Nonetheless, the Fit-O-Meter also illustrates the value of even moderate activity over time…if you hold the line on eating surplus cals, even those walks will do some good w/respect to keeping the pounds off, in the long term. Four per week (880 cals) represent the calorie equivalent of 1 pound of fat per month for someone my size – not bad for a low intensity activity that’s relatively painless and simple to do.
So check out the calculator and play around with it a bit: it’s a good tool for exploring the relationship between your activity and your waistline.
