How much to exercise everyday?

Question

How many calories should a person who isnt dieting loose through ONLY exercise? (About how long should this take?) What are the best ways to accomplish this?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You probably should exercise at least one hour and 30 minutes a day by eating a good diet (not dieting, but good meals) to lose weight. Pilates, jogging, and weight lifting help get rid of fat and weight fast.

Answer 2

So you want to lose fat, do you?

Note the semantic difference there – you want to lose fat, not weight. Weight is a combination of a bunch of different things, most of which are very beneficial to keep around (muscle, bones, blood – you know, the good stuff). You want to lose fat, so keep that in mind.

Surprisingly enough, it’s not that hard – from a ‘What-to-do’ point of view, that is. The actual mechanics of fat loss are easy, and will end up making you feel a lot better than any pile of junk food ever did. The real test, of course, comes down to willpower and the desire to actually put the work in to get the results.

Will it happen quickly? No. Will it be as easy as 20 minutes three times a week? No. Can I buy the fat-loss for 3 easy payments of $19.95? Not a chance.

Losing fat requires time, patience, and forethought. If that’s too much for you to deal with, then you might as well stop reading now.

1. Calories

You’ve kept reading, which means that you’re my kind of person. So let’s talk numbers.

First thing first – how much fat do you want to lose? If the number is bigger than 2lbs/week, then go back to the part about time, patience and forethought, and begin again. Trying to lose any more than 2lbs/week (without the use of pretty strong supplements/steroids) will result in either a)muscle loss (which is bad), b)a lowering of your body’s metabolic rate (which is bad), or c)both (which is really bad). If you’re starting from a big number (ie. your bodyfat percentage is above 15% and you need to lose a lot of fat) then 2 lbs a week is a good number to start from. Aiming for more will do the above (the bad stuff above). As your bodyfat % lowers and your weight gets lower, you’ll want to aim for smaller increments per week; it gets harder to lose fat the less you have.

You see, your body doesn’t want to give up the fat it’s got. Call your body crazy, but it has knowledge ingrained from a few millennia ago, when food was scarce and being fat and strong was a good way to ensure surviving both a saber-tooth tiger attack and a long cold winter without much food. With that in mind, the lower your bodyfat %, the more your body starts to rebel against your fat-loss goals.

Now that you’ve got that number in mind, let’s talk about calories.

For starters, the obvious qualifier. No method is exact. They’re not going to describe the exact number of calories that your body needs to take in. What the following is a good starting point. We’ll get to how to fine tune it shortly.

The bottom line of fat loss is that calories in and calories out are the single over-riding factor. If you aren’t burning more calories per day than you’re taking in, then (barring exceptional genetics) you won’t lose much fat. After you get the nutritional part of the equation squared away, there are lots of neat things the body does that work in conjunction with the calories in vs. calories out principle, but the first thing to consider is still your daily caloric intake. There are a couple of ways to calculate your required daily intake; some are complicated, some are not.

We’ll start with the semi-complicated way (it’s not really complicated, but that’s an often heard excuse when given this method). The Harris Benedict method follows – the HB info is taken from the Clean Eating III thread by karocka.

Your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) is the amount of calories your body (given normal metabolic conditions) burns in a day, given that you do nothing more than exist. No eating, no walking, no getting out of bed. These are your ‘existence’ calories. To calculate your BMR, use these formulas:

Men BMR = 66 + (6.3 x Body Weight in lbs) + (12.9 x Height in inches) - (6.8 x age)

Women BMR = 655 + (9.6 x weight in kilos) + (1.8 x height in cm) - (4.7 x age)

Now that you’ve got your BMR, you’ve got a good starting point for how your body (at your current weight) burns calories. Now it’s time to use that information and figure out how many calories you burn during a normal day. You know, when you crawl out of bed and actually do something. Take the BMR, and multiply it by the Activity Multiplier below that best describes your average day:

Activity Multiplier

Sedentary = 1.2 (little exercise, desk job)

Light Activity = 1.375 (light exercise/sports 1-3 days/wk)

Moderate Activity = 1.55 (moderate exercise/sports 3-5 days/week)

Very Active = 1.725 (heavy exercise/sports 6-7 days/week)

Extreme Activity = 1.9 (heavy exercise/sports, physically demanding job)

Now, if you’re trying to decide where you fall – say you’re thinking you may be between light and moderate activity – then pick a number in between. Remember, this isn’t exact, so don’t stress too hard.

So now you have a rough estimation of how many calories you use during the day, courtesy of the Harris Benedict method.

To figure out how many calories you want to take in every day, you need that first number from earlier, the one about lbs/week. If