People usually associate exercise with burning calories or compensating for eating extra calories.We perceive that I will burn these extra calories tomorrow, so why not eat today. Generally, a 60-70kg female burns 200 calories in a moderate-intensity 30 minutes cardio session. Calories burned varies from person to person. Each individual has a different metabolism.
These 200 calories are easily equal to a slice of thin-crust pizza. So if you think that you can eat an entire pizza and will be able to burn additional calories with 1 hour of cardio, you are to a fault. Exercise has more benefits than just burning calories. Exercise helps to improve cardiovascular health, sleep, mood, cognition, memory, and bone health. Exercise also helps decrease the risk of many chronic diseases such as hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, high cholesterol, and even some cancer. Along with this body releases the feel-good hormone called endorphin.
If you think of exercise to compensate for desserts and processed food, you are missing significant benefits of exercise and a healthy lifestyle.
So to sum it up, if you think spending an extra hour on the treadmill will help for the extra calories you consumed, you have completely misunderstood the concept of exercise. If you have had a big cheat meal a day before, don’t worry. Go back to your prescribed diet plan and start following it; don’t waste your time feeling guilty about the cheat meal start focusing on the meal plan. Anyways to gain 1 pound weight, an individual must eat 3500kcal. So do not overthink and do hours of unnecessary cardio to feel good about eating out or skipping an entire meal.
In reality, if you ate a cheat meal and are exceeding 1000 calories from your daily intake, then to are under a 2000 kcal weekly deficit, assuming that you are in a 500 kcal deficit for other days of the week, which means that you still have lost fat. Instead of feeling guilty, get back on track.
Exercise is for getting strong and not to compensate for the excess calories.
