Mikey Moon's health and fitness column: Get your energy balance right

You will have heard this phrase before, I know I certainly bang on about it a lot.

Getting your energy balance right is paramount for losing body fat, it’s really simple when you break it down and a lot less scary.

If you consume more calories than you burn, you will gain weight – calorie surplus.

If you burn more calories than you consume, then you will lose weight – calorie deficit.

Calories are energy. We get this energy from the foods we consume each day and that fuels us for our daily activities.

Leftover energy at the end of the day is stored by the body to use at a later date – body fat.

When you eat in a calorie deficit, you burn through all of the calories you have consumed – and then you start to tap into that stored energy, which starts to cause you to lose weight.

Don’t worry, you don’t need to exercise away all of your calories.

In fact, your exercise is actually only a small amount of your calorie burn per day.

Some of the other ways include the following:

BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) – calories burned by the body daily to promote hair growth, nail growth, organ function etc.

NEAT (Non exercise activity thermogenesis) – calories burned while being active without exercising. Walking up stairs, walking to the car, etc.

As you see, there are different ways you can get yourself into a deficit.

Eat less, increase NEAT and enjoy exercise.

Fortitude Fitness is on the Poulton Industrial Estate, Beacon Road. Visit www.fortitudefit.co.uk for more details.

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