EAT

Our Eat is our exercise activity thermogenesis. It is responsible for around 5% of the energy we burn on a daily basis.

Our EAT is our planned exercise so things such as training sessions in the gym, going for a run, going to a class, playing a sport, whatever it may be.

This may come as quite a surprise to you that such a small % of our energy expenditure comes from what we would actually class as our exercise. But I will explain why.

Imagine you train 4x a week, for an hour a time. (Which is more than most, on a consistent basis)

That’s 4 hours of exercise/training in 168 hours. A week.

Which means that you are only exercising for around 2.5% of your week.

So, when you split the effects of the training sessions across the whole of the week, you can see how it’s not going to be responsible for as much of your total energy expenditure as you may have thought.

So why is this important to know?

Too often people view their training as the time they are “burning fat.” They think they need to do fat burning exercises, and that without them they aren’t going to progress. Which is incorrect.

The only way you can lose body fat is by creating a calorie deficit. No specific exercise or type of workout is going to make you burn fat.

In knowing that then you can start to choose forms of exercise that you actually enjoy, and that provide you with the physical adaptations, the results that you desire. Training can become about developing an improved level of fitness or strength, or building muscle, rather than just “to lose fat”.

All of which will help you sustain your progress long term, because you will feel better, be more active, and actually stay consistent doing training that you enjoy!

It also helps with something I touched on earlier, that if you have a day or a week where you can’t find time to work out, or you just aren’t feeling it, then it isn’t going to prevent you from making progress.

You can still lose fat without training!