It’s January, and many people make resolutions or set goals about what they want to accomplish in the new year. Many people include the goal of losing weight, and when they think about losing weight, many think of jogging or „going to the gym.“ Let’s examine if this is really a good strategy to achieve weight loss.
Before continuing, we must accept that exercise is really good. Exercise helps keep your heart and lungs healthy.
The right type of exercise strengthens your muscles and helps with bone density. Helps control blood pressure. Exercise helps relieve stress and supports mental health, among other benefits.
Let’s talk about calories
Therefore, exercise is good and everyone should do it regularly. However, in this article, we will examine the use of exercise specifically as the primary weight loss strategy. We will talk about calories.
For the purposes of this discussion, a calorie can be simply defined as a unit of energy obtained from food.
If you eat foods with more calories than your body needs for daily functions, the extra calories are stored primarily as fat and you gain weight. If you eat fewer calories than you need, your body uses previously stored calories for energy and you lose weight.
This is a simplified explanation, but it will serve our purposes. Now let’s do some math. Suppose you weigh 80 kg and want to lose 10 kg. One pound of fat is said to be about 3,500 calories. One kilogram is therefore 3,500 x 2.2, which is 7,700 calories. Therefore, to lose 10 kg, the calories that will be used (or ‚burned‘) through exercise are 7,700 x 10, which is 77,000 calories.
Jogging to lose weight, how effective is it?
If you decide to start jogging to lose weight, how many calories would you burn by jogging daily?
If you jog for an hour and run 5 miles, you will burn about 697 calories in that hour. To burn a total of 77,000 calories, you will have to run for an hour each day for (77,000 / 697 =) around 110 days, while monitoring your diet to make sure that you do not consume additional calories, because then you would regain some of what you have jogged.
If you jog like this three times a week, it will take you around nine months to lose 10 kg. In all this, we have not taken into account the time it will take for you to develop endurance that allows you to run 8 km in an hour, nor have we counted that your body has adapted to jogging and therefore uses fewer calories for each race. This is, therefore, an optimistic estimate.
So, we can see three things from the above: First, by losing 10 kg in 9 months, we see that exercise is a pretty slow way of trying to lose weight. Second, even while exercising, you still need to control your food intake, or you will lose weight at a slower rate, or even gain weight.
Third, to lose 10 kg in 9 months through exercise, you will need a fairly high level of discipline, to maintain the habit of exercising, three times a week for an hour each time, for nine months, while controlling your diet. throughout the entire period.
However, do not despair. If you want to lose weight, proper eating habits can produce satisfying results faster and more realistically. People lose even a pound (or more) per week by monitoring the calories they eat, rather than consuming them, and then trying to burn them off.
