Doing lots of burpees, mountain climbers, squat jumps, and other fat-burning workouts is not the answer to shedding pounds of belly fat.

Conventional wisdom is that if you want to lose tons of body fat, you should do rounds of non-stop heart-pounding exercise until you’re left on your knees, exhausted, huffing and puffing while dripping with sweat.

Metabolisms will be revved, belly fat will be melted, and pounds will be lost.

There are thousands of articles written on effective fat-burning workouts. Not all of them could be wrong, could they?

Well, I can agree that they are calorie burners. Also, they’ll improve your aerobic fitness, lung health, and work capacity when done consistently.

But they’re not going to make you any leaner.

Here’s why:

Your body will fight back

In 2012, a team of researchers in Denmark ran a simple experiment. It involved two groups of overweight young adults exercising six days a week for 13 weeks. One group exercised for 30 minutes daily, burning around 300 calories each workout. The others exercised twice as long, burning roughly 600 calories each time.

You might think the group who exercised twice as long would burn more fat. But you’ll be surprised to know the fat loss was virtually identical. Adults in the 600-calorie group ended the study no leaner than those who did half as much exercise.

Wait, what do you mean? They exercised longer, so they should end up leaner.

You see, working out can affect our hunger. It can stimulate our appetite, so you end up replacing the calories you worked so hard to burn, if not more.

Research has shown that there are two types of people.

Some are compensators (who eat more following exercise), while others are non-compensators (who don’t eat more or may even eat less).

I fall in the latter.

As a result, if I stop exercising, I find I have less appetite. But if you fall in the former, exercising longer or harder doesn’t necessarily mean leaner or more fat burned as you may compensate by eating more.

That’s just one-way exercise is linked to excess food consumption.

Self-licensing

There’s also a phenomenon known as self or moral licensing, where being “good” permits you to be “bad.”

Let me give you a personal example.

Right now, I am spending most of my free time building a wooden shed in my backyard for a personal home gym.

It’s been a month.

I spend few hours on weekdays after work and 8–10 hours on this project on the weekends.

Construction is physically demanding and burns many calories as you keep moving around.

With all the calories I was burning, you’d think I would be several pounds lighter by the end of the month. However, I have gained a few pounds for a simple reason: I ate massive amounts of food at the end of each day, partly because I felt I deserved it, as I have been working all day. After all those hours spent building the shed, I told myself I could eat whatever I wanted.

Also, burning many calories is physically and mentally taxing, especially with high-intensity calorie-burning workouts.

As a result, you will be tired, exhausted, and maybe even sore. Once you stop exercising, you’ll move much less than you would have simply because you don’t have the energy.

Also, instead of cooking a meal from scratch, you’re likely to order takeaway. Instead of taking a walk after dinner, you’ll probably binge on your favourite show on Netflix.

It’s another form of compensation; only instead of eating more between workouts, you burn fewer calories.

Either way, your energy balance stays similar despite hardcore workouts, reducing your non-exercise activity thermogenesis, or NEAT for short.

This phenomenon was first described by Dr. James Levine of the Mayo Clinic in the early 2000s. Neat refers to the calories you burn with physical activities other than sleeping, eating, or intentional exercise. These include activities like cooking, gardening, housework, or even just fidgeting.

Also, you may be surprised at how much NEAT contributes to our daily calorie expenditure. The difference between two people could be as much as 2,000 calories a day. Similar to eating two medium-sized Big Mac meals in the UK.

There is also a growing body of research that shows that if you burn lots of calories with exercise, your body adjusts by spending less energy elsewhere, independent of NEAT or your energy intake.

Say you were moderately active. But you add extra training days to increase your overall activity level to increase calorie expenditure.

But this necessarily doesn’t increase your daily calorie expenditure. For reasons we don’t yet understand, the human body appears to cap the number of calories it will burn from physical activity.

Dr. Herman Pontzer explained the phenomenon of constrained energy expenditure in this article.

If we exercise hard or long enough, we can increase our energy expenditure, at least in the short term. But our bodies are complex, dynamic machines shaped over millions of years of evolution in environments where resources were usually limited. Our bodies adapt to our daily routines and find ways to keep total energy expenditure remarkably constant in response to increased physical activity.

Dr. Pontzer believes that your body budgets for the cost of additional activity by cutting back on the calories it would ordinarily use on the metabolic tasks that keep you alive.

So, when it comes to burning body fat with exercise, human metabolism is too complex to allow you to manipulate any aspect of it without affecting other elements.

Once you understand this fact, it’s unsurprising that the workouts we describe as “fat-burning” don’t work as intended.

Yes, they’re effective at burning a large number of calories in a short amount of time. But they also cause your body to fight back by adjusting your appetite, activity levels, and metabolism, making your quest to lose fat increasingly tricky.

Therefore, don’t think of exercise as a way to burn fat.

Also, the amount of calories a given workout burns is not the only or most important way to judge its effectiveness.

Instead, focus on increasing strength, flexibility, endurance, and muscle mass, contributing to a longer, healthier, improved quality of life and can help you get leaner over time.