We had a discussion this morning at Achieve Bootcamp about how many calories the session burns and what that actually means.

We tend not to focus on calories at Achieve because they don't really mean much when nutrient quantity is high.  The main problems arise when food / nutrient quality are poor and then it's still not really the calorie that causes the issue but the affect the non-food has on your system.

However because the rest of my industry focuses on calories I have to explain how it really works and my principle for making exercise and nutrition work with regard to weight loss and fitness.

It's really simple, in fact so simple that I'm almost embarrassed to write it.

Here goes:

Keep your food calories and exercise calories completely separate.

Why?

How many times have you done a workout at the gym and checked out the calorie display and "banked" it to have a treat when you get home.

That is a recipe for poor results.

One of the main reasons being, those displays are guesstimates at best, they vary so much.

I went for a bike ride last week and being a gadget geek had my heart rate watch, my phone app which also connects to my heart rate, cadence sensor and GPS and my bike GPS.  I rode for a couple of hours and the difference between the calorie counts on the three gadgets was close to 2000 calories.

If I had only looked at the high one, that could have caused me some serious damage on the food front, over estimating by almost a days worth of food.

Fancy a creme egg this weekend?

Have one, enjoy it but don't think about exercising to justify the 170 calories because it's just depressing.  Two bites for around 100 burpees or two miles of running.

Keep the food and exercise completely separate.

Eat good quality food to feel satisfied and sustained.

Exercise to increase your strength, fitness, health and well being.

Don't play them off against each other as it's a losing battle.

Eat for purpose, train for purpose, keep it simple.

Darren 'eats a creme egg in one bite' Checkley

P.S. I'd estimate that a typical 45 minute Achieve Bootcamp burns around 500 calories during the session with a rise in metabolism equalling at least an additional 500 over the next 36 hours.

P.P.S. Last year I burnt 10,000 calories in one day during an ironman triathlon.  That was nineteen hours of exercise.  It didn't take me nineteen hours to replace them the next day :)