Have you heard a lot about the ‘afterburner effect’ lately? What exactly is it and how do you use it? Do you have to buy anything? Of course not. It’s simple and easy to activate your fat afterburner. To lose fat you either have to eat less, or you can increase how much your body burns. I don’t know about you but I like eating so I’d much rather increase how much my body burns. As it turns out, it’s really quite easy to get your body to turn on its metabolic afterburners and burn more calories.
We’ve all seen the activity calculators, the ones that say if you jog for 30 minutes you burn off 325 calories – these are very misleading and pessimistic. Back in 1918, researchers James Arthur Harris and Francis Gano Benedict, discovered that doing cardio caused the body to burn up way more calories than these charts predicted. Doing cardio puts the body’s metabolism into overdrive so that it continues to burn more calories for around 24 hours after the exercise stops. Harris and Benedict came up with some formulas which predict the how much these fat afterburners will burn up, which is what my calorie calculator is based on.
Note that doing cardio 20 minutes a day, is negligible but when you up it to 35 minutes a day it really starts to kick in. By 50 minutes a day, the fat afterburner is in overdrive chomping up 580 calories a day while you sit and do nothing.