While physical activity can help you burn off fat, knowing how much fat and how fast depends on several factors, including your size, your diet, the type of activity you do, your level of fitness and the duration of your activity. The Mayo Clinic.com guide to exercise and weight loss points out that, when you diet and exercise, you need to burn 3,500 calories to lose one pound of fat.
Function
In his article "The Fastest Way to Burn Body Fat," fitness trainer Stefan Aschan explains that cutting calories and burning calories form only part of the equation in a weight loss plan. Burning fat demands a different type of workout, one that has you doing aerobic as well as anaerobic activity. Long, moderate level activities favor fat-burning metabolism while intense shots of speed or strength address your carbohydrate-burning metabolism. For example, if you ride a stationary bike for half an hour at 65 percent intensity, you will burn 82 calories, and half of those will be fat calories. Working out at 85 percent intensity for the same amount of time burns around 160 calories, but less will be from fat because you have switches to anaerobic exercise. Thus, at moderately vigorous levels of cardiovascular exercise, you can expect to burn about 80 to 90 fat calories per hour.
Strategies
Genevieve Monsma's article "Burn Fat Fast" describes several strategies fitness experts recommend for increasing the amount of fat you burn and weight you lose. Try eating a protein bar a couple hours before exercising to increase your endurance and thus amp up fat calories burned. Do strength training before cardiovascular work to warm up your body and raise your heart rate so that you burn fat more efficiently. Keep workouts diverse and challenging to make you work harder and burn more fat calories. Pump light hand weights while on cardio machines to make the workout more vigorous.
Plateaus
As people lose weight and gain fitness, they can hit a plateau. In her article "Lose Weight with Short, Intense Workouts," Selene Yeager reports that doing interval training can resolve this problem. She cites several studies of people who peppered a standard 30-minute cardiovascular workout, such as walking or jogging, with 30-second sprints every few minutes. These people saw their endurance increase and burned more calories than those who did a standard moderate-level workout. Likewise, Aschan notes that a person doing interval training on a stationary cycle, rather than only medium intensity or high intensity, burns 173 calories of which 50 are fat calories.
Benefits
Yeager credits intense workouts such as interval training with benefits beyond burning fat and losing weight. You can build muscle and raise your metabolism, which will help you burn more calories throughout your day. Interval training can also increase your energy.
Considerations
Health and diet expert Dr. Mehmet Oz recommends several foods for helping you burn fat faster as part of his one-month Ultimate Summer Slim-Down program. Grapefruit or grapefruit juice dilutes fat and stimulates fat-burning. Chilies can boost your metabolism and start burning calories within 20 minutes of eating them. You can burn up to 50 fat calories by adding spices such as ginger and cayenne pepper to your meals.
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