Burning Calories v Restricting Calories for Fat Loss

Creating a calorie deficit for fat loss

If your current fitness goal is fat loss, you’ve probably heard by now that you need to be in a calorie deficit. But how do we do that? Well, first we need to figure out a baseline, or what we call our “Maintenance Calories” which is the total amount of calories we need to consume to maintain our current bodyweight. Maintenance calories factor in things such as your age, sex, weight, height, and current activity level. You can use a calculator online to get a rough estimate of this number, but bear in mind that it isn’t 100% accurate, it is however a good starting point. Next, tracking your calories for a week or two to figure out whether you are at maintenance or not is going to help you with creating a calorie deficit. Once we have maintenance figured out, how do we create a calorie deficit? Do we reduce the number of calories we are eating, or just try to burn more calories? Let’s take a closer look at both!

Pros & Cons of Burning Calories

The biggest advantage to intentionally burning more calories is, you have to exercise more! Whether it’s walking the dog, lifting weights, or chasing the ice cream truck for an extra couple of blocks, more activity means more improvements to your physical fitness and mental health. Strength training specifically will help to build muscle, which in turn will increase your metabolic rate, which means your body will burn more calories at rest just from having to sustain your new gains! On the other hand, if you are somebody who is already pretty active, adding in even more activity can be fairly time consuming. In addition, it’s much harder and takes much longer to burn calories than it is to consume them, thereby increasing fatigue and potential feelings of hunger. It can take over 10 minutes of cardio to burn just 100 calories, this could be a one mile run or even a brief stint on the Air Bike, which sounds tough just reading it! Now consider how much faster it is to eat those 100 calories and then some.

Pros & Cons of Restricting Calories

When it comes to restricting calories, people’s instinct is often to eat as few as possible. The less calories I eat, the more weight I’ll lose, right?! Well, kind of. The problem with drastically restricting calories is the principle of diminishing returns. The weight will start to come off pretty quick sure, but it’s not sustainable over the long term and can even lead to over-correction or binge episodes, ergo undoing most if not all of the initial weight loss. On the other hand, small changes to your caloric intake such as reducing portion sizes, snacking a little less between meals, or subbing full soda for diet, can be more than enough to make great changes to your fitness and nudge the scale closer to your weight loss goal. As we previously stated but now in reverse, it’s much easier to eat just a little less than it is to exercise a lot more.

Perhaps a little bit of both?

With all that being said, it’s all about balance. Doing a little bit of both goes a long way. You don’t have to cut out all of your favorite foods or exercise an extra 5 hours per week to make significant changes. Start small, and keep things simple. Here are 3 simple steps you can implement right away:

Track your food and daily steps/exercise for a week to get a clearer idea of your baseline. You can track food with apps like Ate, MyFitnessPal, you can also use a written journal or pictures to gauge portion sizes. Most smartphones have a step tracker and they do a good enough job to give you a rough idea of your daily movement, and log your other workouts in a journal. Start with something as simple as “Date – Strength Workout, 60 minutes. 8/10 – very hard work”.
Increase your daily non-exercise activity with things like parking an extra block or two from the office, take calls on your feet when possible, pace back and forth when brushing your teeth, taking the stairs instead of the elevator even if just for a couple of flights.

Be more cognizant of portion sizes and nutrition labels. Not all foods are created equal, and some foods don’t hold a lot of bang for your buck, meaning they have a lot of excess calories for what ends up being not a lot of food. Keep snacks light and minimal between meals; focus rather on more consistent, higher volume meals with plenty of vegetables.