"It is interesting that enormous numbers of TV, radio, newspaper and magazine ads talk about amazingly fast rates of weight loss, with some diet or some piece of excercise equipment! We tend to consume around 2200 Calories of food energy and use up roughly the same amount each day.It is rare when the difference, either way, is greater than around 200 Calories in a day. It also turns out that the sorts of exercises usually done at Health Clubs in working out, tend to rarely even double our normal body energy consumption of about 100 Calories per hour(thereby burning off only another 100 Calories per full hour of such exercise, again rarely more than 200 [extra] Calories burned off in such an extended workout session). We note that bodyfat is a very compact source of energy supply (the whole point of it regarding survival!)and a pound of bodyfat contains around 3500 Calories of chemical energy stored in it. This indicates that two or three weeks are often likely necessary (3500 divided by 200 or about 18 days).To be able to lose even ONE pound of bodyfat! People who try to lose weight by dieting and/or exercise get frustrated at such slow progress!(For success, they must have immense patience and incredible dedication to the effort, both of which seem opposite of modern hurry-up and have-it-now attitudes!) TV and magazine and newspaper and billboard ads brag about diets that lose 50 pounds in 50 days or something like that Think about it.In order to lose 50 pounds of bodyfat in 50 days: It is necessary to lose or use up more than 1 pound every day. And such ads and concepts rarely also even attempt to get the person to also reduce the excess amounts of food they eat which caused them to become obese in the first place! If such a program could succeed, it would mean using up around an EXTRA 5000 Calories of energy from stored bodyfat each and every day. Even if the person did not eat anything at all for 50 days, the body's metabolism could only use up around 2200 Calories each day! Where the actual total body weight loss would then be around 30 pounds in those 50 days!(Our bodies have an amazing ability to survive for many days when no food is available!)(By the way, people who go on long religious Fasts tend to lose MORE than this amount of total body weight, but that total loss also includes a large amount of WATER that is also lost in the process.) There is no easy way for our bodies to use up 5000 Calories per day! Do you see why such claims are exaggerations and/or misleading? It might be useful here to discuss a related subject, regarding what happens when we exercise hard. We will consider here a world-class Marathon runner.In the intense running of 26 miles, it may seem surprising but it is well documented that ONLY around 2,600 Calories of energy is used up during the entire race.(total body needs are therefore around 4800 Calories on that day (2200 for metabolism + 2600 for the work of running the race)! Note that this is ONLY around 3/4 of one pound of (extra) bodyfat that gets consumed due to the running.That is around 100 Calories per mile. If each mile is run in six minutes, that is around 1000 Calories per hour, That is a LONG way to run to only lose less than one pound of bodyfat!" | 
