Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> "You need to burn 3,500 caleries to loose 500g of body fat."
>
> Um... really? I would have thought that the amount of energy you need to
> burn would be related to the amount of energy you consume in the first
> place... no?

In general, this is just the energy density of fat.  It doesn't mean that if you
run 35 miles or so, you will loose one pound of fat.  Aside from hydration,
there are a bunch of other things going on.  The relative proportion of
carbohydrate and fat stores that you burn changes with the type and duration of
the exercise, although it's all interconnected anyway.  For the most part, you
burn mostly fat in your day-to-day activity, but once you start exercising, you
go through a number of different phases.  I won't pretend to know all of the
details, but the point is that this figure doesn't really tell you much about
weight gain/loss.

In my own experience, I find that if I sit around all day, I don't really need
to eat much for a couple days, and if I run quite a bit, I get really hungry
for at least a couple days.  So even if I burn an extra 3500 calories, it seems
that I tend to make up for that anyway.

If you systematically deprive yourself of a net 3500 calories over the course of
a week, you might find yourself a little more sluggish, lowering your metabolism
a bit, ultimately coming closer to breaking even anyway.

In short, put the computer to sleep, enjoy the outdoors when you can, and don't
worry much about 3500 this or 500 that.  :-)

 - Ricky

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