Can you burn off those calories?

Exercise equivalents can give people good idea of how much they’re consuming

It’s over a month into the new year, and you’ve stuck with your fitness routine but haven’t seen the scale budge. It may be time to look at calories in and calories out — and whether you have a realistic view of that equation.

Weight loss is a result of creating calorie deficits in the body, which can be done both by calorie-cutting on the food side and increased energy expenditure on the exercise side. But there is a human tendency to overestimate how many calories we burn during (and after) exercising, while underestimating the number of calories we consume. That’s where the concept of exercise equivalents — the amount of exercise needed to be undertaken to burn roughly the same number of calories in a food item — can be useful.

The best way to think of exercise equivalents is as a tool that can “help make us more aware of what we put into our bodies,” as Ben Fidler, a Washington, D.c.based personal trainer, puts it.

Let’s consider a chocolate glazed doughnut with sprinkles from Dunkin’ Donuts, which is 290 calories, according to the company’s website, and the average American woman, who weighs about 169 pounds (77 kg), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That woman would have to spend about 75 minutes of normal weight training or about a half-hour of running at 5 m.p.h. (8 km/h) to burn roughly 290 calories. For the average American man, at about 196 pounds, the corresponding numbers are about 65 minutes of weight training and about 25 minutes of running at 5 m.p.h. (8 km/h).

These figures come from the American Council on Exercise’s online physical activity calorie counter. With it, you can plug in your weight to see what exercise you’d have to engage in, at what intensity and for how long to burn a certain number of calories.

I’m not trying to single out doughnuts. A serving of delicious bacon cheese fries at Shake Shack is 840 calories. The exercise equivalent for the woman would be running at the 5-m.p.h. pace for roughly 80 minutes; for the man it would be running at 5-m.p.h. pace for about 70 minutes.

Or how about Panera Bread’s amazing 800-calorie kitchen sink cookie? For Chicago resident Steffen Jacobsen, a boot camp participant, who is 41 and 220 pounds (about 100 kg), it would take about one hour of running at the 5-m.p.h. pace to burn 800 calories.

“That gives me pause,” Jacobsen says. “At this age, it’s all a trade-off. If you eat that one cookie, it’s like you negate all your hard work, at least from a weight-loss perspective,” he adds, acknowledging that working out has many benefits besides keeping weight under control.

Katherine Basbaum, a registered dietitian with the University of Virginia Health System, agrees that for weight-loss purposes, exercise equivalents can help understand calories. “It’s not a magic bullet, but I see it as one of several tools to understand weight loss,” Basbaum says.

And rather than focusing only on calories, Basbaum has patients look at fat, fibre, sodium, protein and other macro- and micronutrients to home in on what foods best fuel the body and its specific needs.

While Fidler agrees exercise equivalents can be used to help with food, he cautions against making workouts seem like a penance. In the end, the key is to find daily exercise and healthy food you like so you can sustain the habits over time.