How do you burn calories?

Creating a calorie deficit is the key to losing weight. A calorie deficit is simply the difference between what your body uses and what you eat. To lose weight, you either need to eat less or burn more. Burning calories can be accomplished using a variety of techniques.

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Energy Expenditure

First of all, you need to understand that your body is constantly burning calories. A tool such as the calorie calculator will help you figure out how much energy your body needs each day. The number it gives you is the amount of calories your body burns to keep itself alive (including exercise). Exercising is only a small part of your total calorie needs.

Your body burns calories when you eat, read and even sleep. Exercise is pretty much the only way you can sizably increase the amount of calories you burn. Different modes of exercises will burn different amounts of calories. Any exercise that is weight bearing will burn more energy than an exercise in which your weight is supported by something (swimming, bike riding). Cardiovascular exercise (running, biking, rowing) is usually thought of as the best way to burn calories.

Cardio

When you're trying to lose weight, the advice you'll hear over and over again is to do cardio. While cardio does burn a large amount of calories and will help you lose weight, strength training (weight lifting) shouldn't be completely ignored. Muscle tissue is a lot more metabolically active than fat tissue is.

Muscle

Take two scenarios: person A is 160 pounds and has a body fat of 5%, person B is 160 pounds but has a body fat of 20%. Person A has a lot more muscle and therefore burns a lot more calories throughout the day, even when they're not exercising. This is because person B's fat tissue does not burn nearly as much energy as the muscle on person A.

Strength Training

Even small amounts of strength training will help you build muscle which will speed up your metabolism and help you burn even more calories. Remember that if you're trying to lose weight, exercising is only one part of the equation. You can exercise all you want but if you don't combine that with a good diet, your weight loss strategy will fail.