Burn plenty of calories

(Your metabolism and the most efficient ways to burn calories)

To stay healthy, it is important not to store too much body fat. That means the number of calories you eat and drink should be about the same each day as the number of calories you burn.

This is hard to calculate, of course. But if you are active and burn plenty of calories, you may find your body will do the calculation for you. Studies have shown that the human body can be amazingly accurate in judging the calories it needs, particularly in highly active people.

You are burning calories all the time

You burn calories all the time, day and night. Your brain needs energy for thinking, and your muscles must keep burning energy to keep you warm. (If you get too cold, chemical processes in your body will stop working properly.)

The amount of energy you burn when not moving is called your 'resting metabolism'. For most people, this account for about two-thirds of the calories they burn each day. The rest is burnt by muscles moving.

In a day, the average British man burns around 2,600 calories, and the average woman about 2,100 calories, but these vary from individual to individual. Our body check page will help you estimate how many calories you are burning.

Incidentally, food labels generally assume you burn 2,000 calories a day, i.e. that you are a fairly average woman.

Burning fat efficiently

If you are aiming to reduce your body fat through exercising, you will do best if you choose the right sorts of activity – ones that burn mostly fat rather than mostly glucose. There is a lot of misinformation (and wishful thinking) on the web about this. Weight training may be great for building muscle, but for most people it is poor at burning calories (even when you take into account its positive after-effects).

You would do better to spend your time on continuous activities such as brisk walking, cycling, swimming, running etc.

Some of the things you can do

Help your body keep in healthy balance and not build up fat by burning plenty of calories.

Have a look at our activity check page to see what activities are good for burning calories and to estimate how many calories you burn each week. The body check page will give you your resting metabolism.

What the book covers

The book discusses in more depth the important balance between the calories you consume and those you burn, and gives examples of how people’s bodies can often get this balance precisely right without any conscious thought.

It also explains

your metabolism, and what affects how many calories you burn each day
how muscles work and when they burn fat or glucose
the types of exercise that burn fat most efficiently
why some circumstances and forms of exercise lead your body to burn mostly glucose
how this can leave you hungry without necessarily having much impact on your fat stores.

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