What burns the most fat?

Photo by  Trust "Tru" Katsande Unsplash

Have you ever spent hours at the gym, several days a week for months, just trying to burn more fat and fit into a smaller size jeans? This is not an uncommon way to approach losing fat. The question is...did it work for you?

Before we get too far along, I should probably be clear about something...doing anything is better than doing nothing. Walking on a treadmill for five minutes a couple of times a week is better than sitting on the couch and eating potato chips every day. So, let's just get that out of the way. My focus here is not to try to say that certain things are bad or wrong or even useless.

My goal is to try to focus on the things that work best. You may have heard it said before, but the "good" is the enemy of the "best." What does that mean? It means that you often will stop pursuing something that might be better for you because you're already doing something that is good for you. Don't stop at good when there is still better out there.

With that said, let us press on.

If you haven't read the article on energy balance, maybe take a few minutes to read that first. When you understand a bit about energy balance, the next thing to understand is that the things that "burn" energy (a.k.a. Calories) can fit into about four categories. The four things that burn Calories throughout any given day are; exercise, digestion, N.E.A.T (I'll explain that in a bit) and other metabolic processes (such as repair damaged tissues, brain activity, cellular activity, etc.).

As much as it pains me to say it, all the hard work you put in at the gym, grinding away on the treadmill or the stationary bike, or slamming battle ropes, or doing backward, overhead, dumbbell tricep extensions while standing on a BOSU platform with a band around your knees (Ok...that's maybe a little more ridiculous than some of the things I've seen)....all that activity accounts for just about 10% of the Calories you burn in any given day. Yep. That's it! Just 10%. It just doesn't seem fair that all that work amounts to so little.

The next category is digestion. Yes. That's left. Digestion. It actually takes energy to break down your food into the components that the body can use. What's more, this process actually burns about twice the daily Calories as all that work you did in the gym! On average, our daily digestion accounts for about 20% of the Calories we burn every day. Please don't use that information to just start eating more!

Third, we have N.E.A.T. So, what is that? It stands for Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis.  This is just a fancy term that refers to all the various movements you make all day long; reaching to turn off your alarm, picking up your cup of coffee, thumbing through Facebook on your phone, waving to a friend when you pass them on the road on your way to work, etc. Every time you move a part of your body, it requires energy to do so. N.E.A.T. is just all the movements of your body that are not specifically related to exercise. Like exercise, for the average person, it is responsible for about 10% of your daily Calories burned.

That leaves metabolic processes. This is all the cellular activity, brain activity, tissue repair, etc. It left surprise you that this category accounts for up to 60% of the Calories your burn every day. That is a very significant amount of energy!

As I mentioned, I'm a bit advocate of finding the "better" rather than being content with the "good." That being the case, wouldn't it make sense to focus on the process that burns 60% of your daily Calories rather than the one that only burns 10% of your Calories? The next most obvious question is...how do we take advantage of this fact?

We are going to be getting down into the details on this next week. But for now...feel free to stay with the stair climbers and don't forget those 2lb dumbells while you're at it. Come back next week when we'll get into why strength training takes advantage of that 60% Caloric burn.