The answer to the question "how much exercise does it take to lose 10 pounds" depends on many factors, including your daily calorie intake and the type of exercises you do. To lose 10 pounds of fat you must create a net loss of 35,000 excess calories.

Feature

A calorie is simply a measure of energy. Your body uses the stored energy contained in food to fuel all of its activities from the basics, like pumping your heart, to moving your muscles. Weight loss occurs when your caloric expenditure, caused by these energy demands, regularly exceeds your caloric intake from food.

Energy Cost of Exercise

Physical exercise is the act of exerting the body's muscles. Every application of muscle movement comes with a calorie cost. The cost of physical exercise depends largely on the type of exercise it is, the intensity with which it is performed, and the duration.

Considerations

In order to determine how much exercise is needed to lose weight you not only need to consider the caloric cost of the exercises you're doing, you need to account for how much of a calorie deficit this cost is creating.

Preparation

Set your daily calorie allowance. Use the BMR resource at the end of this article to estimate your Basal Metabolic Rate. Establish a target for the number of days you want to achieve 10 pounds of weight loss in.

Calculating

Divide 35,000 by your target number of days to achieve weight loss. Add the result to your daily calorie allowance. Subtract your BMR from the above sum. This final result represents the estimated amount of calories you need to burn each day through physical activity in order to achieve your goal.

Tips

The Calorie Cost resource link shows the energy cost of many common physical activities and exercises.

Source:

UNM: Calorie Burning: 7 Programs that Burn a lot of Calories

UNM: Making Sense of Calorie-burning Claims

Resource:

BMR Calculator

Calorie Cost