Fat Block: Why you Aren’t Burning Fat with Exercise by Jerry Brainum 12/22

 

Your goal is to lose excess body fat. You have embarked on a diet that features a lower calorie intake and even controls how many carbohydrates you consume. Since you are aware that fat is oxidized or "burned" only in the presence of oxygen, you ensure that an aerobic or "cardio" component is part of your regular training. As such, you do up to an hour of cardio at least 4 times a week since you are aware that you need that minimal frequency to affect body composition or promote fat loss. Despite doing everything right, however, your fat loss is agonizingly slow. Even worse, all that cardio you are doing doesn't seem to help. What could be going wrong when everything seems so right? 

The problem can be traced to what you do when you are not in the gym. If most of the time when you are not training you are sedentary, especially if you remain seated for hours at a time, that could be the root of the problem. I've seen many people come to the gym every day, yet never seem to lose any body fat. That can be explained in a number of ways. For one, many are under the delusion that working out for an hour or so allows them to eat whatever they want when they are not training. While exercise does burn calories, a typical weight workout burns only about 300 calories and that assumes you are not resting an excessively long time between sets. Those that like to play with their cell phones in between sets for up to 15 minutes or more (I see this every day at the gym) are lucky if they burn 100 calories during their entire workout. Those calories are easy to replace and the net effect is no fat loss, nor any muscle gains for that matter. Trust me, I am no Luddite. I love new technology, but there is a place and time for everything and the gym is not the time or place to check your Instagram or Facebook account every 5 minutes. 

But even if your training is more serious and you leave the phone in the locker where it should be during training, what you do when you're not in the gym can have a major effect on how much fat you burn when you exercise. I've written previously about the dangers of excessive sitting in a previous article in Applied Metabolics, but I came across some new research showing that sitting too long or not moving enough can block fat oxidation during exercise. It sounds hyperbolic to be sure, but I will explain how this happens later.

The human body is a biological machine made for movement. An entire body of research exists to show . . .