Fitness measures your ability to use oxygen, whilst weight management depends on calorie balance (calories in and out). In the body these are very different concepts.
In actual fact:
- you can get fitter and actually gain weight: if you do lots of cardio & still overeat;
- you can lose weight and decrease fitness: if you stop exercising whilst dieting;
- you can happily lose weight and get fitter: with diet and exercise.
AND
- A fitter person has a much greater capacity to burn calories during exercise: like having a V12 engine compared to a 4-cylinder; BUT
- Has little advantage if they don’t use that capacity: like only driving your V12 to the shops on Sunday.
- Fitter doesn’t mean having a higher metabolism either.
A crap diet isn’t helping anybody’s weight, fit or not. You can still use fitness though to help you lose weight. Let’s put this in perspective: a very fit person may burn 1200 calories / hour running, compared to a very unfit person shuffling at 400 cal /hr.
They will feel the same sense of effort, and the fit person needs to only do one third the exercise time as the unfit person. Imagine how that could impact your weight loss goals!
How fitness affects your ability to burn fat
Apart from not burning as many calories during exercise, people with low levels of fitness have poor fat burning capacity, with their bodies choosing to burn more carbs instead. Boosting fitness changes the way cells work, allowing a person to burn a much higher proportion of fat both in exercise and at rest.
In my next post, We’ll explore more of the many benefits of being fit.
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