How many calories do you have to burn in order to lose a pound?
Conventional wisdom has it that one need to burn 3,500 calories to burn one pound of body fat.
It is a lot trickier to determine, though, how many calories people ACTUALLY burn when they engage in physical activities. Most pieces of cardiovascular equipment will give a readout of caloric expenditure after the body weight has been entered but this is at best an approximation.
A great way to determine how many calories you burn in a day would be to use your own heart rate monitor or a body bugg. Once you know your calories burned for that day, then you will be able to figure out how much you should eat in a day to lose that one pound of fat. If you work hard at it, you should lose one pound of fat per week.
Answer is C but do not really suggest tracking (unless prepping for a comp) due the psychological disadvantage. Counting calories burned or intake is just not healthy to do in my opinion. It is not realistic and not necessary to lose weight. Imposing a commitment of counting will likely set you up for success because it is very difficult to maintain that. Also, losing one pound of fat a week is nice but not realistic for most. I would say half a pound is generally more realistic for most populations. Setting goals that are more attainable will likely result in more success.
Fuel the Movement,
JM
3,500 calories burnt is one pound lost. Karin brought up a great point when she said that exercise equipment offers an approximation at best as far as accurate caloric expenditure goes. To figure out exactly what your metabolic rate is at any given time, you have to look at METs. As a measure of oxygen uptake in ml/kg/min… 1 MET is about 3.5 ml/kg/min… What’s cool about METs is that some pieces of equipment that measure METs (by estimate) can help trainers to figure out what the intensity of the exercise is for the client. Really heavy intensity exercise like jumping rope is about 10 METs. This translates into a kind of RPE chart without the chart, roughly.
Of course, Resting Metabolic Rate is dependent upon so many different extraneous environmental and physical factors, that even MET measurements are, unfortunately, a best educated guess unless in a medical setting with proper equipment to measure everything and control for other stuff.