Does this statement resonate with you?

Losing weight and getting in shape is what comes to mind if you are conscious of your body weight and shape. Good diet and regular exercise is the key. Exercise here means burning fat and not just calories. Bear in mind that burning calories is not the same as burning fat.

When you exercise, your main focus should be to lose body fat and that can’t happen when you are burning calories. As you exercise, your body starts to burn calories. What you should take note of is that the calories that burned in your system are from carbohydrates.

Your body needs a certain amount of oxygen for it start burning fat. To measure the amount your body needs, you need to keep up your target heart rate when exercising. Usually, during the first 15 minutes of your workout, your body burns sugars and carbs. Take note that if you keep on burning calories from carbohydrates, it will let you to lose “water weight” which in turn reduces your body’s metabolism.

The carbohydrate calories that you burn can be thought of as your energy calories. This means if you burn more carbohydrates, your body’s muscles will not receive the needed energy to raise your metabolism that burns fat indirectly. This means you have to increase your calorie intake to replace the burned up energy calories when on an exercise programme.

Your body reaches the point where you burn fat only after passing through many stages during aerobic exercise. As I said above, the body burns sugar and carbohydrates during the first 15 minutes of a workout. After 30 minutes your body enters the fat burning zone which is where we want to be. From this point your body will continue to burn fat even after a few hours of your workout. That is, if your body doesn’t demand for more oxygen. There is also the situation where you might have worked out too hard and unable to supply your body with the needed oxygen to burn fat.

In this case, it becomes clear that when exercising, you have to take a steady pace. It should not be too fast nor too slow. You do it in such a way that your body will use the stored fat and not carbohydrates or sugars as a source of energy.

Tip: Both aerobic and anaerobic exercises are good if you want your body to burn fat quickly.