Fat Burning Zone – Truth or Lie?

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Ever heard of the “Fat Burning Zone” where you need to do cardiovascular exercise and need to maintain your heart at a specific rate to burn more fat?

I’ve done some research and this is so far what i have found.

Let’s start with the basics:

“A calorie is a unit of measurement for energy. In most fields, it has been replaced by the joule, the SI unit of energy. However, the kilocalorie or calorie remains in common use for the amount of food energy. The calorie was first defined by Professor Nicolas Clément in 1824 as a kilogram-calorie and this definition entered French and English dictionaries between 1842 and 1867.” – wikipedia

The 3 basic source of energy our body needs are carbohydrate, protein and fat.

Now here is the concept. When at rest people normally burn a small amount of calories, and at this state most of the calorie burned are from fat (let’s say 70/30). But when our body shifts from rest to active mode, we start to burn a larger amount of calorie and at the same time our body switches to a fast burning energy source (carbs), which let’s say would give you a ratio of (50/50) burn rate.

Now here comes the mis-conception, don’t train too hard so that you can maintain a good healthy ratio of fat burning rate, because if you do you would be burning more carbohydrates than fat. Makes sense?

I guess it does, until you put the calorie burning rate into play. In the calorie burning game it’s linear, the more activity your body does, the greater the amount of calorie you burn (but the ratio of fat/carb changes)

Now lets do a some computation.

Activity	Calories Burned	Fat % Percentage	Calories from Fat
Watching TV for 30 Minutes	50	70	35
Jogging for 30 Minutes	150	60	90
Sprinting for 30 Minutes	300	40	120

There is indeed some truth in the fat burning zone, but for me i’d rather stick with the basics, if you want to loose fat try to burn as much calories as you can.