The science of sexy is really simple. Your body stores as fat excess calories consumed that aren’t burned. Increase your activities, or add an activity into your lifestyle, and you’ll burn calories.
The amount of calories you’ll burn will depend on the intensity of your activity, of course—
running will burn more compared to walking, for instance.
But burning calories alone is no guarantee to weight loss. To lose a pound of fat, after all, requires you to burn 3,500 calories on top of what you normally burn doing what you usually do every day.
Everybody burns calories everyday, regardless of lifestyle. You burn calories sleeping, sitting, reading, eating, breathing. So even if you’re sedentary, you are burning calories. They’re just not enough to burn that extra cookie you had for lunch today.
When those unspent calories from extra cookies pile up over time, you fool yourself into thinking that your clothes are shrinking.
Burning 3,500 sounds like a lot. Calories burned from running, for instance, is 75.6 cal/mile for a 120-pound person. (Formula from Runner’s World: .63 x your weight equals your net calorie burn per mile.)
That’s why the best way to rid yourself of excess fat for the long haul is to make small and doable lifestyle changes one at a time.
Dual-action drink
According to Angeline Go, Del Monte product manager, Fit ’n Right, which debuted in 2007 with L-Carnitine, is now improved with the addition of GCE (green coffee extract). Go said the new Fit ’n Right is now a dual-action drink to aid one’s weight loss journey.
“The L-Carnitine magnifies the impact of exercise, and the GCE blocks the build-up of fat,” Go said.
A natural ingredient from unroasted green coffee beans, GCE partially blocks the body’s absorption of sugar, thus cutting your daily calories. Less calories means lesser chances of it being stored as fat.
Go also said clinical studies show that daily consumption of GCE results in a significant fat-loss compared to L-Carnitine alone. If coupled with an exercise program or activity, it can aid you in burning even more calories.
“The caffeine in GCE is part of what promotes weight loss, but the amount of caffeine is not that high,” she said.
A 330-ml bottle contains 40 mg of caffeine, less than the caffeine in a can of soda and 1/3 of the caffeine you drink in a cup of coffee. That means you cannot use Fit ’n Right as substitute for your energy drink. Go recommends drinking a 330-ml bottle of Fit ’n Right everyday on top of an exercise program or activity.
“When exercising, monitor your heart rate. Your heart rate is like your gas gauge. If you monitor that, you’d know if you’re pushing yourself too hard or exercising too slow,” said fitness expert Raul Banzon.
Safe zone
Banzon, whose brother collapsed and died from cardiac arrest minutes after crossing the finish line during a full marathon race, warns against pushing yourself too hard. He said if people stayed within their bodies’ limits, perhaps tragedies such as that which struck his brother can be prevented.
Before exercising, know your maximum heart rate, Banzon said. This is determined by subtracting your age from 220. Your target heart rate, the safe zone for your heart to keep on exercising, should be 60-75 percent of your maximum heart rate.
You don’t need to buy a fancy Polar HRM to know your heart rate. Find your pulse, count the beats for 10 seconds, multiply that by six and you get your heart rate. If you count the beats for six seconds, multiply that by 10. To get an accurate result, use the clock as timer.
