To lose weight and get in shape you have to have a good diet and exercise regularly to burn fat. The first thing to understand about exercise is that just because you’re burning calories doesn’t mean you’re burning fat. Your primary focus when exercising should be on losing body fat, and you can’t lose body fat simply by burning calories. When we exercise, our bodies start to burn calories, but the calories that are burned are calories from carbohydrates in our system. In order to burn calories from stored fat, your body requires the presence of oxygen. There is a certain amount of oxygen your body needs to start burning fat, and the only way to measure the amount your own body needs is to maintain your target heart rate during exercise.

Please understand that if you continue to burn only carbohydrate calories, you will primarily lose “water weight” which will lead to a slowing of your metabolism. Also, think of calories burned from carbohydrates as your energy calories. If you lose too many energy calories, your muscles will not receive enough energy to increase your metabolism, which will indirectly burn fat. Therefore, you should increase your calorie intake when on an exercise program to replace energy calories burned.

Burn calories from fat during exercise

During aerobic exercise, your body goes through several stages before it reaches the point where it is burning fat. You will hear people say that you are only burning sugar (carbs) and not fat during the first 10 minutes of exercise. This is true up to a point. I say this because you will continue to burn sugar beyond 10 minutes if you don’t exercise enough for your body to need more oxygen; or you’re overtraining and can’t supply your body with enough oxygen to burn fat. When you exercise, you need to move at a steady pace (not too fast or too slow) so that your body uses stored fat (not carbohydrates or sugar) for energy. Also remember that just because you’ve reached the fat-burning stage doesn’t mean you’ll stay there. Staying in the fat-burning stage once again depends on whether you’re moving at a pace that’s right for your body. Make sure you are within your target heart rate range.

Burn calories from fat at rest

The only way to continue burning calories from fat hours after you’ve finished exercising is through the anaerobic exercise of weight training. Weight training is the key to burning fat at rest. Weight training is an anaerobic activity that will burn more calories than aerobic exercise. The calories you burn during weight training exercises are mostly carbohydrate calories (meaning you need to eat even more calories per day for energy); but the calories you burn at rest are mostly fat calories. The reason you burn fat at rest is because weight training increases your metabolism, which uses stored fat for energy.

For your body to be the ultimate fat-burning machine, you need to do both aerobic (cardio) and anaerobic (weight training) exercises.