So, if you’ve been following the blog for the past four days: you figured out that you want to get in shape (woot), you’ve learned what your your Body Mass Index is (sweet), how to calculate your Basal Metabolic Rate (oh hai), and what your Daily Caloric Consumption is (nice!).  If you missed this stuff and want to read about all it, there are links at the end of this blog.  Now, why did we spend four days doing math problems?  Because we had to create a stable base from which we can build.  Now that you know your body type, and how many calories you are burning each day, we can create a custom plan for you that involves decreased calorie intake (less Twinkies), increased physical activity (more running), or a combination of the two.

Here’s the important stuff you need to know:

• 1lb of body fat equals 3500 calories – Remember this forever!
• Hate exercising? To lose 1lb per week, cut out 500 calories every day from your diet.
• Junk food for thought: 1 bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and 20 oz Coke = 500 calories
• Don’t want to diet? Do enough exercises to burn 500 calories per day to lose that lb per week.
• Best of both worlds? DO BOTH. Little changes to both will dramatically improve your health predicament.

Now, which exercises burn the most calories?  I’d tell you about every freaking activity in the world, but that would take way too much work and this blog would take forever to write.  Instead, how about I link you to a few great resources instead:

• Health Status’s Activity Calculator, set your length of time, and then type in how long you did it for, and it tells you approximately how many calories you’ve burned.  Sigh, yes there is “sexual activity” listed for activities, so feel free to giggle and put down 5 hours and see how calories you’d burn (it’s a lot).  Get it out of your system?  Do you feel better now?
• PrimusWeb’s Calorie Counter: put in your weight, and length of time, and it gives you calories burned for 222 activities for that time frame.  My advice – put down 60 minutes and print it out.  You can then base whatever activities you do off of that.  Run for 15 minutes? Divide “running” by 4 and you got your calories burned.  Success.

My advice for when you only have 20 minutes to train and want to burn maximum calories: Interval Training for the win!

-Steve

Previous Posts

• Level up your Life #1 – Making a Change
• Level up your Life #2 – Body Mass Index
• Level up your Life #3 – Basal Metabolic Rate
• Level up your Life #4 – Determining Your Calorie Levels