% of fat burn question.

coryrood

I've got a Polar M400 I use for my workouts and as an activity tracker. when I log a workout(running, cycling, whatever) I get a calorie burn number and a percentage of fat burn number. I'm attempting to lose some belly fat while maintaining my weight or gaining some muscle(I'm doing SL 5x5) so for eating back calories would I want to consume the total workout calories minus the fat burn percentage? Thanks for the info.

vorgas

Your body doesn't know the difference between fat energy calories and muscle energy calories. Mass is merely stored energy.

When you do any form of exercise fuel comes from a number of different sources. Energy stored in the cells themselves, glycogen (sugars) stored in the muscles, fat metabolized with oxygen, proteins in the muscles themselves, and to some extent food in your intestines. That's right, lifting weights actually eats away your muscle.

To try to hold on to as much muscle mass as possible, you need to eat lots and lots of protein. Various sources have different recommendations. Generally it is between 1 gram per kilogram of muscle all the way up to 1 gram per kilogram of body weight.

No need to over complicate matters by backing out fat energy. It is at best a rough estimate anyway.

Azdak

The Fat calorie estimate is even more a rough guess than the total calorie estimate. Even if it were accurate, the amount of fat burned during exercise has no effect on stored body fat, independent of total calories burned.

coryrood

Ok I'll stick to my eating back 50% of my workout calories