How to Break Down Fat

Breaking down fat involves a process of taking in less calories than you burn through exercise and daily activity. While this concept seems simple, it can actually be more complicated than expected if you are not used to tracking your caloric intake and your caloric expenditure. With a few simple steps, it is easy to create a nutritional budget and begin to burn fat with daily activity.

Things You'll Need

• Food journal
• Calculator
• Comfortable workout clothes and sneakers

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Instructions

• 1

  Start a food journal and record all foods you ingest. This is the easiest way to track the number of calories you are taking in each day. If you are unsure how many calories certain foods contain, you can use online databases such as Calorie Count to determine the caloric value of food items, restaurant meals and beverages.

  Track the calories consumed at breakfast, lunch and dinner, as well as snacks. This will give you a general sense of the number of calories you are consuming per day.

• 2

  Find out your daily caloric needs, or your resting metabolic rate. Calculators are available online, but you can also calculate this number yourself with the following formula:

  RMR = (your weight in kilograms) + 6.25(height in centimeters) - 4.92(age) + 166(gender) - 161.

  In the above equation, fill in your measurements, and then substitute, for gender, a (1) if you are male and a (0) if you are female.

  For example, a RMR might look like this:

  RMR = 794.6 + 1143 - 137.76 + 166 - 161

  RMR= 1804.8

  This number (RMR) means the number of calories you burn daily at rest, without adding any additional physical activity. This is the number of calories you could eat and maintain the same weight without exercise.

• 3

  Determine the amount of calories you should eat to burn the amount of fat you desire.

  One pound of fat contains 3,500 calories, so cutting or burning 500 calories per day for one week will result in the loss of one pound. Therefore, if your RMR is 1,800 and you want to lose four pounds in one month, you must lose one pound per week. You would subtract 500 calories from your RMR, or burn 500 extra calories through physical exercise, to burn a total of 3,500 calories every week for four weeks.

• 4

  Determine how many calories you can burn through physical exercise. Most gym equipment designed for cardiovascular exercise will allow you to enter your weight and age and calculate your caloric expenditure as you exercise. The caloric expenditure for several common exercises (calculated for a 150-pound person for 30 minutes of exercise) are as follows:

  Cycling at a 10- to 11.9-mph pace burns 204 calories in 30 minutes. Cycling at 12 miles per hour average burns 272 calories. Hiking for 30 minutes burns nearly 204 calories.

  A 150-pound person running at a 12-minute-per-mile pace burns about 272 calories, and 340 calories at a 10-minute mile pace. Additionally, swimming at a moderate pace for 30 minutes burns roughly 270 calories.

  It is easy to see that a small cutback of 200-250 calories per day plus 30 minutes of moderate exercise can help one achieve the goal of one pound of weight loss per week. If the metabolism is kept active with proper nutrition and the body is exercised, this weight loss will come from fat storage rather than muscle.