← The Dr. Shannon Show
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Before we get into today's episode, if you want to actually improve your body composition and are sick of random workouts that just wear you down and burn you out, that's exactly why I built evlo. EVLO is science back strength training designed to help you build muscle, improve body composition and feel better in your body without beating yourself up or living in the gym. You can try evolo now for two weeks free if you visit evolofitness.com welcome
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to Fitness Rewired on the Dr. Shannon Show, a nine episode capsule designed to close the gap between fitness culture and exercise science so you can see higher return on your effort and finally feel like you're doing enough. Many fitness beliefs come from marketing and tradition and don't align with current evidence. When you learn the truth, you can rewire your thoughts around fitness. That shift leads to higher quality actions, better results and health you can actually sustain. I'm your host Shannon Richie. Welcome to the show. I want to start this episode by having you ask yourself this question. How would you exercise or not exercise? If I told you exercise doesn't matter much for fat loss, a lot of people would just say if it didn't matter for fat loss, I wouldn't be exercising. Honestly, I think one of the biggest lies we've been sold is that exercise is what causes significant fat loss. And this is why I wanted to lead this capsule with this topics specifically, because I think that if we understood what exercise is doing for your body and what it's not doing for your body, you would exercise much differently and see better results. It's truly not our fault for believing that exercise is what you need to do to lose fat or to lose weight. Some of my earliest memories of fitness were infomercials showing dramatic P90X transformations. I remember my dad did P90X. We got all the DVDs and it was really sweaty. It was really hard. I think I did some of those workouts when I was a kid. I would do them with him and it was so hard. There were the before and after photos that made it look like these workouts were the main driver for these people's fat loss. But science has known for a really long time that exercise contributes moderately at best to fat loss. And yet fat loss is still the primary reason why people exercise. I truly believe that we are less fit and see worse results because this is the focus. Whereas if you understood that calorie burn doesn't matter much for weight loss, you'd choose workouts that actually created change in your body. You would wear yourself down less and you'd stay consistent because it wouldn't feel so miserable. I know I've done so many episodes on the topic of calorie burn, but I wanted to do this one again today because, number one, I know we have a lot of new listeners. Number two, the science is evolving in real time and I'm going to talk about that towards the end of this podcast. And then number three, this topic is truly one that will transform your relationship to exercise. I know it did for me because it is something that you kind of have to hear a lot of times for you to truly internalize this information. This information for me was pivotal because I actually started seeing better results when I realized it's not as simple as, oh, I can eat a 500 calorie piece of cake and then just do a 500 calorie workout tomorrow and erase it. That helped me see better body composition changes because I no longer expect my workouts to burn off what I ate or earn a meal. I feel fuel more intentionally knowing that it isn't really how it works, which has in turn allowed me to see better body composition changes and truly have a better relationship with food and exercise. And number two, it's immensely helped my mindset around exercise. If you're trying to burn calories, your workouts are long and miserable and never feel like enough. You're kind of on that constant hamster wheel. I used to have this mindset and I would get hurt all the time. But when you learn that exercise calories don't really move the needle that much anyway, you stop expecting them to be fat burning and burn off what you ate and start using them to create true adaptation in your body. So today I wanna talk about calorie burn and fat loss, how exercise does help, how it doesn't help, and how to think about it in a way that actually works. My hope is that by the end of this episode, you'll stop punishing yourself with workouts, stop judging exercise by calories burned, and stop thinking of food as something you need to burn off later or even really can burn off later. And start using exercise in a way that actually supports fat loss if that's your goal, instead of fighting against your own physiology. So here's the bottom line. Calorie burn matters, but not nearly as much as we think. Body weight ultimately changes through energy balance. This is thermodynamics, calories in versus calories out. So movement is absolutely a part of that equation. The mistake people make is assuming that calorie Burn directly translates to fat loss, but it's more complicated than that. When you burn calories through exercise, your body often compensates. So sometimes you will get hungrier and unintentionally eat a little bit more. But often it's by subtly reducing energy spent elsewhere, and sometimes by lowering metabolic output in ways that you don't consciously notice. So this means that the calorie deficit created by exercise is actually smaller than what your fitness watch suggests. This is why trying to quote, unquote, burn off food through workouts alone often feels frustrating and inefficient. It may also explain why you feel like you're working really hard but not seeing the scale move. Many people unintentionally overestimate how much of their deficit is coming from exercise. But their bodies are either compensating in ways that reduce overall calorie burn or, or they're increasing their hunger, or both. Exercise is incredibly valuable for your health. It's valuable for muscle preservation and long term sustainability. But quite honestly, it's not as great for a fat loss tool. Nutrition plays the larger role in creating a reliable calorie deficit. Fat loss works best when calorie burn comes from consistent sustainable activity paired with a modest dietary deficit, not from trying to create the largest possible deficit through exercise. This is because when you go into a deep calorie deficit from both food or exercise, or both, your body begins saving energy wherever it can. Your body always wants to be at homeostasis. It doesn't want to use your fat stores, so your metabolism adapts. When energy out is really high and food is really low, hunger starts to rise, spike. Spontaneous movement drops. So you burn less calories just by the movement that you're kind of subconsciously doing. Metabolic processes slow down and recovery demands increase, all in an attempt to save energy. So you might be burning 500 calories in a workout and eat 600 fewer calories. Assuming that, oh, now I'm in a 1100 calorie deficit, 500 from my workout, 600 from the deficit from my food. But physiologically, your body begins conserving energy because it senses that steep deficit. The real deficit ends up being much smaller than expected. Even though you're working out really harder and eating very little. How much smaller is that deficit? Newer research, which I'll talk about in a moment, suggests that total energy expenditure increases by only 30%. For example, if you burned 500 calories from a workout, total daily burn may only rise by 30% of that. So you burn 500 calories, but your total burn is actually only 150 calories. The body partially offsets added activity by conserving energy elsewhere. So the net increase in daily expenditure is smaller than the exercise itself would suggest. This doesn't mean you're not burning 500 calories in your workout. You could be, but it's just that your body had compensated throughout the rest of the day. So your net calorie a deficit is 150 calories. That's just random numbers, but that's what the research is suggesting. So basically you're working really hard but not moving the needle very much. This is why tracking calories burned or trying to earn food can really sabotage your results. Calories out are simply too hard to measure and track because your metabolism does have this adaptive process. This isn't to say that you won't lose weight by adding exercise, but you may be able to have the exact same results by just exercising more moderately. Eating in a small deficit instead of a big deficit and you'll be much less miserable and you'll not have so much compensation from your body. So this begs the question, what should that look like? How much should you exercise and what should your deficit be? If your goal is fat loss and preserving muscle, there might be kind of this physiological sweet spot where your body isn't compensating too much. So for most people this looks like a small to moderate calorie deficit. So maybe 200 to 400 calories below your maintenance calories, combined with resistance training so that you maintain muscle and then moderate amounts of cardio, that's maybe again, we recommend like 150 minutes of cardio per week. In this range, fat loss progresses steadily while compensation stays manageable. If you're pushing far beyond that. If you're going into a much deeper calorie deficit with food and exercising much harder, progress often slows even though you feel like you're working harder. When deficits become aggressive, especially combined with large amounts of cardio, the body doesn't just lose fat, it also loses muscle too. And muscle is metabolically expensive. If your body senses energy scarcity in the way of loss of cardio and an intense deficit, and you're not sufficiently stimulating your muscle with proper strength training, it will break down muscle to conserve energy. So even when people are strength training, combining severe dieting with exhaustion based workouts limits recovery capacity and increases the risk of muscle loss. This matters because muscle helps preserve resting metabolism, it improves insulin sensitivity and largely determines how the body looks and functions. So we want to at least keep our muscle mass, if not build it without proper programming. So reasonable cardio and intentional strength training, fat loss becomes really hard to sustain long term. In fact, although cardio has typically been the go to for fat loss, newer research from Herman Ponser found that resistance training may show less calorie compensation than aerobic training. So according to his research, the body seems to compensate the most when people do a lot of cardio, especially when they're also dieting. But resistance training looked different. In the resistance training studies, the body didn't appear to, quote, unquote, cancel out as many calories and and in some cases, people actually burned more total calories across the day than researchers expected based on the workout alone. So why does this happen? The authors aren't sure, and they were quick to say that the samples were small and so they can't be sure why this happens or if this even happens reliably. But it is an interesting hypothesis. The authors think that resistance training requires extra energy for muscle repair following the workout, which keeps the total energy expenditure elevated, whereas cardio does not require extra repair following the workout. So your body doesn't need as much energy after the workout is over. That said, there were fewer resistance training studies like I said, and it's harder to accurately measure how many calories lifting burns, so the authors are careful not to overstate this. But still, the overall pattern suggests that cardio is more likely to trigger the body to conserve energy elsewhere, while strength training may lead to less compensation and sometimes a larger overall increase and daily energy use than you'd assume from just the workout itself. So that doesn't mean don't do cardio. That doesn't mean that resistance training is the ticket for fat loss. It just means that, man, this is complex and we shouldn't use exercise to be a gauge of calorie burn and to track calories burned from exercise, because it's just so hard to know how many calories your body is burning overall when you add exercise. So just to summarize, before I get into the evolving research on this, which I find really interesting, don't worry about calories burned. Stay active overall. Yes, but if fat loss is your goal, focus on a small calorie deficit from food, continue to resistance train so that you can at least maintain muscle, if not build it, and add about 150 minutes of cardio weekly. But don't expect your workout to do the heavy lifting for your cardio deficit, because you may be unintentionally sabotaging your results. Okay. For those of you that are interested in what the research is saying right now. I want to get into the latest paper on this topic because there has been newer research published from February 2026 that adds to this conversation. The science is evolving in real time, literally. In November of 2025, I did a podcast updating you all about some research on this topic. So let me catch you up quickly in case you missed that episode. So two researchers are in this right now, and they have published findings that initially looked contradictory. So there's Herman Poncer, who believes in the constrained energy expenditure model, the one that I kind of just discussed, that the body tends to adapt as you add more exercise. And then there's Kristen Howard, who published a paper that did not find that the body constrains energy. That energy expenditure seems to be more additive. So when I first looked at Howard's study, it looks like exercise simply stacks on top of each other. So let's say you burn 2,000 calories without exercise, just living your daily life, and then you do a 500 calorie workout. So you burn 2, 500 calories for the day. It's additive. But there are two important details of this paper. Number one, the participants in Howard studies were weight stable, meaning they were eating enough to replace the calories that they burned. They were not in a calorie deficit from food. And the study was cross sectional, so it was comparing different people rather than adding exercise to the same individuals. So they were seeing active people burn more calories than less active people. But since then, in February 2026, Poncer published a new paper that helps to kind of reconcile this confusion. So instead of asking whether calorie burn is constrained or additive, the newer work suggests the body can behave differently depending on the context. When researchers look at exercise intervention studies where the same person adds exercise, total daily expenditure increased by only 30% of what an additive model would predict on average. So for example, let's say you burn again that 2,000 calories without exercise. That's just your daily Life. You burn 2,000 calories and you do that 500 calorie workout, but your body compensates. So Instead of burning 2,500 calories total, you might only burn 2,150. Totally random numbers. But just to illustrate the point, in other words, as you add exercise, the body partially compensates. Compensation appears strongest with aerobic exercise, like I said, especially paired with calorie restriction. And the calorie compensation is smaller and sometimes even reversed with resistance training. Changes in non exercise movement like fidgeting or talking didn't consistently explain why the body was conserving this energy when you added more activity. Some compensation appears to come from shifts in resting and sleeping metabolism and other internal reallocations that we don't consciously perceive. So the updated takeaway isn't that calorie burn doesn't matter, and it's not that it perfectly is additive either. It's that the body dynamically regulates energy use. The more you push exercise volume, especially while under fueling, Poncer found that the more adaptation you tend to see. And this matches with what we see in real life. What I've personally experienced. I'm sure with what many of you have personally experienced, you add more and more exercise and it doesn't seem to move the needle very much. So chasing higher and higher calorie burn, especially alongside aggressive dieting, often becomes less effective over time because the body adapts, fat loss becomes more predictable. Again, when you maintain your muscle mass through resistance training, keep activity consistent but sustainable, and create a small calorie deficit that doesn't feel like you're forcing your body to fight. When you stop trying to burn more calories and instead focus on working with your biology, fat loss becomes a lot more sustainable and far less exhausting. So I hope this helps you partially change your mindset around exercising to burn calories. I know understanding this was truly transformative for me. I really hope it helps you too. Tomorrow we are piggybacking on this conversation and talking about why hard workouts or exhausting workouts aren't necessarily more effective and why resistance training can actually be more effective. Yet it doesn't feel as hard. So we'll see you tomorrow.