Q: Why Does it take longer to lose a pound of fat than to gain one?
A: The short answer: Because calories can be eaten much faster than they can be burned. Calories are sort of like money, but in reverse – you can get into a hundred thousand dollars of debt in one day, but it takes years to pay it off.
Putting It On
A pound of fat has at least 4,000 calories in it. 4,640 calories can be had with just 4 Loaded Cookies & cream shakes from Shake Shack. That’s just one shake every other day for a week in addition to whatever your normal diet is. Drinking half a shake a day isn’t hard to do because they’re delicious, and because liquid calories are the easiest to consume.
Burning it Off
Contrast eating with burning an extra 4,000. For a 160 pound female, this would require 44.5 miles walked at a leisurely pace, 39.2 miles walking quickly, and 34.5 miles jogging (5mph). 44.5 miles leisurely walking would take 14.8 hours, the quick walking would take 9 hours, and the jogging would take 7 hours. Obviously you can do other activities to burn calories; and using an incline, wearing a weight vest, etc. would increase the number of calories burned, but the point is that you can drink 4,000+ calories in 30 min; but there is no way on Earth to burn 4,000 calories in 30 min; or even 4 hours.
Elite marathoners run 100+ miles per week (14 a day), so even they would struggle to run 34.5 miles in a single day.
No, It’s Not All Diet when trying to lose a pound of fat:
It’s popular to use the fact that calories go in faster than they go out as a way to devalue exercise – if you were to say the quiet part outload it would read “since you can’t burn an unlimited number of calories with exercise, then exercise is useless.” As anyone who’s ever reduced their calorie intake knows there is only so little you can eat.
The average woman’s resting metabolic rate (RMR) is 1,400 calories – meaning if an “average” woman did very little today, she would burn 1,400 calories. (With many modern humans getting their step count down to 3,000 or less per day, many adults are close to their RMR.). To lose a pound in a week without exercise and a high step count, this average woman would need to eat 800 calories, or less, per day. This includes weekends. That’s a hungry lady.
Bottom Line on lose a pound of fat:
The little decisions and compromises you make about moving more and/or eating less matter. Here’s ideas to cut calories, and here’s how to have your wine and drink it too, and here is me reminding you to get your workouts and your steps in (you can walk places, park further away, pace when you’re on the phone, use the furthest bathroom, walk with people when you want to talk, etc.).
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