I received a question today via YouTube from someone asking me how many calories my 10-minute fat-burning workout burns. My answer:
Sorry, I have no idea how many calories any of my workouts burn. I’ve never worried about trying to track that information for myself, or any of my clients.
The best way to lose weight is to workout regularly, preferably at a high intensity, and make small but maintainable improvements to your diet. They don’t need to be drastic changes. You can start by making small improvements like, say, eliminating pop, cutting down on sweets, reducing portion size, etc. These are simple changes that you can easily maintain.
Don’t stress out about counting calories eaten and trying to estimate how many calories you burn during exercise. That’s a huge pain in the ass and not a habit many people can maintain.
That’s the exact response I sent to the person via YouTube, but I’ll elaborate on some of those points here in this blog post.
First, if you want to lose weight, you should keep in mind that temporary changes in diet will produce a temporary reduction in your weight. Once you return to old habits, you’ll return to your original weight as well. That’s why I think calorie counting is so utterly pointless. Who has the time or interest to count calories every day for the rest of their lives? Certainly not me, and likely not you.
Second, if you want to lose weight, you likely want to see results as fast as possible, and therefore you’re anxious to make drastic changes to your diet to produce rapid results. The problem is that drastic changes are extremely hard to maintain. You’re better off making small changes, trying to maintain those changes, then make some more small changes while still maintaining the previous changes, etc. Over time, many small changes will add up to big changes.
So to summarize, counting calories eaten and/or burned is a huge pain in the ass, so don’t bother doing either. Instead, exercise regularly and improve your diet by making small changes that are maintainable over the long term. If you make one small change to your diet each month this year, and maintain all of those changes, by then end of the year you’ll have a drastic improvement to your diet that’s permanent because you’ll have properly developed the necessary habits to maintain those changes.
