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If you want to lose weight by jogging, cycling or walking, you have to be patient.
You can burn around 500 to 800 kilocalories in one hour of running - 7000 are in a single kilogram of body fat.
“You can't just train them away,” says Ingo Froböse, head of the Institute for Exercise Therapy at the Sport University in Cologne.
Lowering your own intake of calories while eating is therefore a much more effective measure to lose weight.
Nevertheless, one should not neglect the factor of exercise in a diet.
It helps to stabilize the dream weight that will hopefully be achieved at some point.
"The decisive factor is that sport changes the body over the long term," explains the Cologne sports scientist.
Or to put it figuratively: “He's coiffing the small car muscle motor that drives the body of an untrained person into that of a sports car.” The muscle mass in the body increases and the number of mitochondria, the power stations per muscle cell, doubles from 1000 up to 2000.
The result: energy consumption increases not only when moving, but also when idling.
Scientists have been able to show that even six months of strength training are enough to increase resting metabolism by seven percent and thus the number of calories that humans burn while sitting or lying down without exerting themselves.
According to the study, this applies equally to younger and older people, women need a little longer for the tuning process.
Seen over the course of a year, one kilogram more muscle means that a person loses one kilogram of fat without doing anything else.
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"In the long term, I can only ensure the success of a diet through exercise," says Froböse.
In addition, there is another effect: after major weight losses, the body tries to regain its old weight by reducing the feeling of satiety, resting metabolism and even the energy consumption of muscles during exertion via the hormone leptin from adipose tissue.
Training seems to counteract this from a certain intensity, because it lowers the leptin level and the feeling of hunger again.
However, for this effect you have to train at least 3000 calories a week - that's about five hours of jogging.
Diligent exercise has another effect that is initially counterproductive: Sport arouses the desire for food.
Other messenger substances are responsible for this.
The first 1000 calories that are painstakingly sweated away are usually related to the week - a reward!
- resumed.
In the short term, you should therefore expect little from sport on the way to weight loss and figure change, in the long term even more.