You lose weight by creating a caloric imbalance. When you eat more calories than you burn, your body stores the excess energy in fat. When you burn more than you eat, your body gets the excess energy by burning the stored energy. You burn fat and lose weight. High-energy dancing attacks this equation from the output side: it burns more calories than you would with more sedentary activities.
Calorie Basics
A calorie is a unit for measuring energy, the same way a gram is a unit for measuring weight. As defined in the field of nutrition, one "calorie" is the amount of energy it takes to raise one kilogram of liquid water one degree Celsius in temperature. It takes 3,500 calories worth of energy to make one pound of fat.
High-Energy Dance
A slow, steady dance like a waltz or foxtrot will burn up a few calories. High-energy dance like salsa, dance team practice, Zumba or dancing at a club can leave you sweating and out of breath. The movements of high-energy dance work the whole body and increase your heart rate to create an extended caloric burn. The vigorous energy output from high-energy dance actually inspired some of the first rounds of group aerobics such as Jazzercise and the Richard Simmons workouts.
Calorie Burned
A 140-pound woman burns about 380 calories in an hour of high-energy dancing. That's comparable to the calories she'll burn in an hour of high-impact aerobics or on an elliptical machine. Because they carry more weight around, heavier people will burn more calories in an our. Lighter people will burn less.
Variations
You won't burn exactly 380 calories in 60 minutes of high-energy dancing every time, even if you weigh 140 pounds on the nose. Your precise burn for each session varies according to what you're wearing, the temperature, the beat of the music, when you last ate, how much you've had to drink, even your mood at the time. You should always consider calorie burn information a "best guestimate," rather than a precise number you can count on for planning.
References
- "Eat, Drink and Be Healthy;" Walter Willett, et. al; 2004
- HealthStatus: Calories Burned Estimator
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