5 Sneaky Ways You Burn Calories

Ajouté : 2026-05-14

[00:00:00]I used to weigh 270 pounds and I felt like I had to hide my body in giant clothes. I thought the only way to lose weight was to starve myself and spend hours on the treadmill until I collapsed. But after losing 110 lbs, I learned something that changed everything. The gym only accounts for about 5% of the calories that you burn in a day. The other 95% comes from what your body does on its own, digesting food, maintaining muscle, covering, and just moving throughout the day. So, in this video, I'm going to teach you five sneaky ways to burn more calories that helped me go from this to this. Which brings me to point number one. Your body burns calories every time you eat. But how many it burns depends on what you eat and which macronutrient you eat the most of. Back when I was doing keto, I was eating. I wasn't starving myself, but I was prioritizing fat, keeping my protein minimal, and not really eating any carbs. I also wasn't thinking about the quality of the food that I was putting into my body. The number on the scale went down, but I looked like a bag of milk. I wasn't happy with what I saw in my progress pictures or what I saw in the mirror on a daily basis. Soft, deflated, smaller version of myself, but not a better version. And my energy was all over the place. When I actually started eating real protein, not protein bars, and peanut butter, but actual chicken, eggs, Greek yogurt, lean cuts of meat, and building my plate around that first, everything changed. same calorie range but completely different macros and completely different food sources. My body changed because it was finally working harder to process what I was eating and I was giving it better quality food. Every time you eat, your body uses energy to process and break down the food. This is called TEF or the thermic effect of food. You can think of it like a toll booth. Your body charges a fee to let the food through. The bigger the fee, the more calories you burn just by eating. But not all food gets charged the same toll. Processed food is pre-broken down, pre-softened, and stripped of its fiber. Your body barely has to try. Whole foods like real lean cuts of meat, real vegetables, fruits, actually eating sweet potatoes, rice, those foods still have their structure intact. Your body has to mechanically tear it apart, push through the fiber, and extract every nutrient.

[00:02:02]That extra work burns more calories. A study in food and nutrition research tested this. Two meals with identical calories and macros. The processed meal burned roughly half the calories during digestion compared to the whole food meal. Now, here's where it gets interesting. Of the three macronutrients, protein, carbs, and fat, protein gets charged the highest toll.

[00:02:22]In other words, it takes the most energy to digest. Your body uses 20 to 30% of the calories in protein just to digest it. Carbs cost about 5 to 10%. Fat only cost 0 to 3%. And when I was doing keto, that's what I was eating the most of. So if you eat 100 calories of protein, your body uses 20 to 30 of those calories just to process it. Eat 100 calories of fat and your body burns almost none of that digesting it. This means a high protein whole food diet is literally burning more calories for you before you even step into the gym. So you don't need to eat less. You need to eat real food with more protein. And your body will burn more calories just digesting it. This brings me to point two. In the gym, most people rush through the part of every rep that builds the most muscle. If you slow it down, you build more muscle. And more muscle on your body means you burn more calories all day long. There was a phase in my life where I was doing group classes that combined the weirdest exercises just to keep things interesting. Lunges into bicep curls into something else. It felt productive in the moment because I was getting tired and sweaty. But random exercises, not actually thought out and focusing on progressive overload for the movement get you exactly that, random results. When I actually started lifting heavy, following a structured program.

[00:03:41]This changed for me when I started training for strongman because I started following a periodized program that had compound lifts and was built for strength and progressive overload and not just to get me sweaty and keep it interesting. And when I learned what actually happens during the eentric phase or the lowering phase of the rep, I started treating that point of every single rep like it was the whole point because it basically is. Think about a squat. Most people just drop down fast and then muscle their way back up. But if you use a slow controlled descent, that's where the mechanical tension lives. And that's the signal that your body actually needs to build muscle.

[00:04:19]Every rep has two parts. Lifting the weight up and lowering it back down.

[00:04:23]Most people only focus on the lift and rush through the lower, but research shows that the lowering phase produces a stronger growth signal. A metaanalysis across 15 studies found that the lowering phase produces 10% muscle growth compared to 6.8% from the lifting phase. A separate study found that taking 4 seconds to lower the weight produced more growth than lowering it in 1 second. Same exercise, same weight, just slower on the way down. Why does this matter for burning calories? Well, because muscle on your body burns calories around the clock just by existing on your body. So, the more you build, the more you burn. And the lowering phase is the fastest way to build more of it. So, control the descent. 3 to 4 seconds on every rep on the way down. Every rep. The part of the rep you're skipping is the part that builds the most muscle. And that muscle is what burns extra calories all day long. This brings me to point three.

[00:05:14]Muscle is the only tissue on your body that burns calories just existing. The more of it you have, the more calories your body burns just at rest without even changing anything about your diet or workout. Here's a thought experiment I like to use with our clients, and you can play along with me here. Think about your goal weight. What you desire the number on the scale to read. Got it?

[00:05:34]Good. Now, I sneak into your house tonight through the front door. You don't press charges. You didn't even know I came. So, I sneak into your house tonight and I mess with your scale. And in the morning, when you wake up, you step on the scale and it reads that number. You're happy. You rejoice. Yay.

[00:05:50]Go me. But then you turn around and in the mirror you see your naked body and you look exactly the same as you do right now. Nothing's changed. Would you be happy because of the number? Or would you be upset because nothing's actually changed? If the answer is you would be upset, it was never the scale. It was about what your body looks and feels like. That comes from body composition, not weight loss. That's the trap that so many women fall into for years. chasing a number on the scale. They're trying to be a smaller version of themselves instead of focusing on the things that they need to do to become a stronger version of themselves. They end up yo-yo dieting, losing weight, and gaining it back again. And because they're not focusing on prioritizing muscle when they lose the weight, it's not just fat, it's fat and muscle, which as we know, muscle takes energy to exist on your body. So, when you lose that muscle, you lower your metabolism. Then when you gain the weight back, when you can't keep your starvation diet together anymore, you gain the weight back and it's fat because you're still not doing the things to prioritize muscle. Each cycle of the yo-yo diet is ruining their metabolism. They don't even know it. And they just get frustrated why it gets harder and harder to lose weight. Your body burns most of its calories just keeping you alive, breathing, circulating blood, maintaining your body temperature. This is called your basil metabolic rate or BMR. and it makes up about 60 to 70% of the calories you burn in a day. Having muscle on your body directly increases that number. Think of it like a car engine. A four-cylinder Honda sips gas, but a V8 Mustang burns right through it. Muscle is your V8.

[00:07:23]More muscle you carry, the more fuel your body requires just to maintain it.

[00:07:28]More calories burned while you're sleeping, sitting at your desk, driving without doing anything extra. And this is why crash dieting backfires. Because when you starve yourself, your body loses muscle to survive. Less muscle equals a slower metabolism. When you go back to eating normal, you gain fat faster because your car got a smaller engine. Building and keeping muscle is how you keep your calorie burn higher long term. Fat just sits on your body, but muscle, it works for you around the clock, and your body burns more calories just doing nothing. Which brings me to point four. Get some sleep. When you don't sleep enough, your body burns less calories, makes you hungrier, and stores more fat. Even if your diet and training are perfect. I want to tell you about the version of me that was freshly separated, trying to build a health and fitness coaching business, raised three kids, and was sleeping 3 hours a night.

[00:08:17]I was doing all the things. I was meal prepping. I was eating on track, was training. I was satisfied trying to build something. But I was exhausted, and I wasn't making the progress that I wanted to see, that I thought I should be making because I was doing all the things. And I told myself it was the stress or my hormones or just the season I was in. What it actually was was my hormones doing what hormones do when you run your body into the ground. I had no leptin telling me I was full. All the ghrein telling me I was hungry. I had my cortisol spiked to the ceiling telling my body to hold on to fat. And I was up late scrolling or eating because my body wanted a dopamine hit because it was tired. Easiest way to get it at that point, food. Nothing good happens past 900 p.m. I say that now and I mean it.

[00:09:03]My 6 a.m. self makes infinitely better decisions than my 900 p.m. self ever did. And this past year was the first year in my entire adult life that I maintained a healthy body weight without it fluctuating 20 to 30 lb.

[00:09:17]Coincidentally or not, I also slept 7 hours on average every night. To clarify, that's not a coincidence. When you sleep less than 7 hours a night, your body increases a hormone called ghrein, which is the hormone that makes you hungry. And at the same time, it decreases your leptin, which is a hormone that makes you feel full. So, you're hungrier and it takes more food to feel satisfied. And this combination can lead to overeating without even realizing it. But then it gets worse.

[00:09:44]Sleep deprivation increases your cortisol, a stress hormone that tells your body to hold on to fat, especially around your midsection. Research shows that people in a calorie deficit who are sleepd deprived lose more muscle and less fat compared to people who sleep enough on the same deficit. Same diet, less fat loss, more muscle loss just from bad sleep. Your body does its deepest repair work while you sleep, rebuilding muscle, regulating your hormones, and getting rid of metabolic waste. All of that costs calories. When you sleep well, your body burns calories, repairing itself. When you don't, that whole system shuts down.

[00:10:19]You're not getting enough sleep and your body's not repairing itself properly.

[00:10:23]Every body is different, literally. But a good goal to aim for is 7 to n hours of sleep a night. Sleep is when your body burns calories to repair and rebuild. Cut it short and you burn less, store more, and undo the work you did during the day. Bringing me to point five. You can fidget your way to an extra 350 calories a day. You can burn hundreds of calories a day without even stepping foot in a gym just by moving more in your normal life. We had a client, let's call her Betty. She came to us convinced that she needed to add more cardio because her workouts alone weren't giving her the result that she wanted. She was already going to the gym 3 to four times a week and nothing was moving. When we zoomed out and looked at everything overall, and we looked at her daily steps, she was only getting 2,000 to 3,000 on average a day. So, she was going to the gym and then essentially sitting still for the other 23 hours of the day. The gym was not the problem.

[00:11:13]The 23 hours outside of the gym was the problem. We got her to 7,000 steps a day just by adding in a walk after meals, standing during meetings when she could, and parking further away. She started losing weight in the first 2 weeks. No extra gym session, no extra cardio session, just moving more throughout the day. Your daily movement outside of the gym, so things like walking, standing, doing the dishes, fidgeting, it's called your NEAt, or non exercise activity thermogenesis. Your NEAT accounts for roughly 15% of your daily total calorie burn. Your actual gym workout only accounts for about five.

[00:11:49]That means your movement outside of the gym burns three times more calories than what you're doing in the gym. A study in the journal Science found that small restless movements like tapping your feet, shifting in your seat, standing instead of sitting can burn up to 350 extra calories per day. That's the equivalent of a onem jog without breaking a sweat or leaving the house.

[00:12:09]So, get a standing desk, pace on your calls, park further from the door, take the stairs, walk after your meals, which also helps with your digestion and blood sugar regulation. These aren't workouts, they're habits, and they add up to way more calorie burn than your workout in the gym. The easiest way to burn more calories has nothing to do with the gym.

[00:12:27]Just stop sitting still. Those are five sneaky ways to burn more calories without ever increasing your gym time.

[00:12:33]But burning more calories only works if you're eating the right foods to support it. So, watch this video next where I talk about how I quit every diet and then lost 100 pounds.