Calorie Compensation Effect Of Exercise

You might be wondering about exercise and what it can do for weight loss. The simple answer is most of us don’t exercise enough to even bother including it as part of our calorie burn.

Some research has even shown that a weight loss diet combined with exercise doesn’t improve weight loss beyond dieting alone. I believe this is because we tend to eat a bit more food after we exercise which ends up offsetting the extra calories burned from exercising.

In other words, it’s one step forward and one step backwards. This is called the ‘calorie compensation effect’ of exercise.

This effect isn’t very obvious. You may not even realize that you’re eating slightly more food throughout the day. If you leave up to ‘feel’ you will always eat up the extra calories that you attempt to burn off with exercise. This is because your body is really good and telling you to put back all the calories you’ve burned off.

When you try to exercise off the calories you need to have a pre-determined calorie goal in mind, otherwise you’ll just eat more food and end up right back where you started.

This calorie compensation effect happens to everyone who exercises. They key to making exercise work for fat loss is having a pre-determined calorie goal and STICKING TO THAT GOAL. If you just go by how you feel it’ll never work.