Calculate Fat Loss
Great, you've decided to start a new fitness or diet plan. You've calculated how many calories you will need to get by, what exercises you plan on doing, how long you plan on doing them, and the if you are really organized, plotted out your schedule. Well, calories are important, but many people also want to know how to calculate their fat loss.
This is not quite as simple as it may seem at first, there are no hard and fast rules about how much fat a given exercise will burn and how much fat your body uses to supply itself with extra energy depends mostly on your individual metabolism, but it is actually impossible to calculate your fat loss for any given activity.
The reason why you cannot calculate fat loss is that it is calories that are burned, not actual fat from the body. Now, if you are using more calories than you are taking in you can assume that some fat will be taken out of your bodies fat cells and you will know the caloric value if you carefully observe the amount of calories that you take in while eating, but even doing this only gives you the caloric value of fat that you loose.
It is difficult to tell where it will be taken from and how many calories are stored in each fat cell. Of course, methods exist that allow you to calculate your fat loss in a general way, but these only give a ball park figure. The base calculations rely on a number called the basic metabolic rate which takes several factors into consideration including your age, height, and gender to come up with a number. From there, a series of equations can be performed that will give you your energy needs based on your activity level. If you are trying to lose weight, your daily caloric intake should be less than the amount of calories these equations will give you. Sadly, this does not enable you to calculate fat loss directly. Even worse many people overestimate their level of activity, resulting in wildly inaccurate calories needs. As is often the case, this results in an unexpected weight gain when many people were trying to calculate their fat loss.
Trying to calculate how much fat you will lose is at best a guess based on your activity level and how much you eat. Accurate numbers are impossible to get, but if you search around you can find methods that will tell you how many calories you should be taking in each day, and reducing it slightly to reduce fat. Increasing your activity level in conjunction with this causes the process to work even better than just one or two alone. Perhaps it is best not to worry about how to calculate your fat loss and instead focus on diet and exercise. It results in far less mental stress than wading through a bunch of calculations, especially when the calculations are only educated guesses.
