If you've been sweating it out on a regular basis and the scale has barely budged—or worse, it spiked—you can likely blame an imbalance of two key weight loss players: calories in (how much you eat) and calories out (how much you burn). What looks simple on paper gets tricky in practice, because a crazy-hard sweat session not only torches calories and revs your metabolism but can also up your hunger quotient.
Luckily, a few quick tweaks are all you need to make sure your workouts are helping—not hurting—your pound-shedding efforts.
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Sweat by Numbers
Sorry to break it to you, but your last ubertough workout probably didn't torch nearly as many calories as you thought it did. "People grossly overestimate how many calories they burn during exercise, especially when they think it's high intensity," says Eric Doucet, PhD, a human kinetics professor at the University of Ottawa. It doesn't help when your bootcamp instructor says each class blasts 1,000 calories (a total exaggeration) or you check the counters on cardio machines (ellipticals have been reported to overestimate expenditure by 42 percent).
Video: Burn 100 calories right now
