Sweating during exercise ≠ losing calories and burning fat, here is the key code...

Burn more calories through exercise and make losing weight easier! Why do you sometimes feel like you’ve sweated a lot, but after entering the numbers on a calorie calculation website, you find that your calorie consumption is not as expected? Today, the nutritionist will explain to you how to calculate the calorie consumption in the database.

Sweating during exercise does not mean losing calories!

Is it enough to exercise just to the point of sweating? In fact, this is a wrong concept. Sweating is related to temperature and humidity, while the calories consumed during exercise are mainly related to how much oxygen is inhaled! Because most energy-generating processes require the participation of oxygen, the calories consumed during exercise are currently evaluated based on oxygen consumption! You may have some experience that after entering your weight, type of exercise and exercise time on a website, the webpage will automatically pop up a calorie consumption figure. So how is this calculated?

This story started in 1941. In order to quantify how much energy is consumed for each activity, scientists found a group of people to do a test. They took the amount of oxygen the body needs during normal rest as 1 (later it was changed to an average of 3.5 ml of oxygen consumed per kilogram of body weight per hour in the resting state as 1, which is now called metabolic equivalents METs). Then they asked the subjects to engage in various sports and calculated the amount of oxygen needed. By comparing the oxygen required for each sport with that for rest, for example, if the oxygen consumption of a certain sport is twice as much, the calories consumed by engaging in this sport will be twice as much! During exercise, if more oxygen is needed, it means that the heartbeat must be faster to deliver more oxygen to the surrounding cells. Therefore, the amount of calories consumed during exercise is most closely related to whether you are out of breath and how fast your heartbeat is! On the contrary, it is not absolutely related to how much you sweat, so don’t think that sweating means losing calories!

METs can also be used as a way to assess exercise intensity.

Here is a simple website for reference (link), which provides the calorie consumption of many sports. You can enter your weight, exercise time and type of exercise, and you can roughly know how many calories you have burned!

In addition, exercise intensity can also be roughly estimated using METs.

METs less than 3: Mild exercise, which means the calories burned are less than 3 times that of normal resting state, usually activities that do not make you breathe easily, such as walking.

METs are between 3 and 6: moderate exercise, which is about the intensity of brisk walking or slow cycling. You will feel your heart rate increase significantly and you may need to breathe a little harder!

METs over 6: Intense exercise, which consumes more calories, but because the heart rate is faster, people who do not exercise may find it difficult to maintain this intensity for a long time.

If you don’t have the habit of exercising, you can follow the United Nations’ recommendations and start with moderate-intensity exercise (between METs 3-6), then gradually increase the amount of activity, increase the exercise time, and develop good exercise habits!

Exercise and diet are like the two ends of a scale. How to balance your expenditure and income is the key to achieving your weight goal. Cofit App organizes hundreds of latest sports consumption data built-in. Download it for free immediately and use it as a more convenient tool to record your diet and exercise at the same time!

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