Is there a way to burn fat using the same amount of time exercising? Or is time the most important factor? MORE exercise burns MORE calories.

I see lots of people who report that they are at the gym daily, doing long and intense workouts, keeping this up for years, yet never losing weight.

Exercise in itself doesn’t trigger fat burning. The process of exercise doesn’t heat your body and melt the fat off. That’s called sweating and losing water weight.

There is a key factor that dictates why many people stay fat, which is very different than the popular notions that consuming more calories than are burned or not exercising enough (sedentary lifestyle) to burn off calories are to blame.

To understand how to burn actual fat with exercise, you need to know the purpose of fat. Fat is potential energy. Fat is actually the largest gland of the body – it even produces hormones. It stores energy. Fat is the body’s energy reserve, which is only used (burned as fuel) under very specific circumstances. Burning fat with exercise involves HORMONES.

Hormones are the messages or signals produced by glands, which direct the body to increase or decrease metabolism. You have 3 hormones that SLOW metabolism and store fat, and 6 hormones that SPEED metabolism and burn fat.

Exercise stimulates the hormones that then do the work of burning fat off your body. Here we will focus on the EXERCISE influences of fat burning.

In my book, The 7 Principles of Fat Burning, I state that people must get healthy BEFORE they can lose weight, not the other way around. All day long, people are telling and selling the reverse lose some weight and your health problems will go away. Obesity is a disease and causes ¦..

The other point I make in my book, is that exercise creates a delayed effect of fat burning. Barely any fat is burned during exercise, but 14-48 hours later fat burning occurs. The most interesting part of this is that the great majority of fat is burned during deep sleep. Poor sleep is a definite barrier to burning fat. This means, you do not burn any significant amounts of fat DURING exercise, but in the body’s RECOVERY process, after exercise. Fat burning hormones are most active in the middle of the night. But it’s crucial that you understand how to use the variables of exercise to create the biggest effect and burn the most fat. These variables are intensity, duration, frequency and type.

Let’s first talk about INTENSITY.
Fat burning hormones are triggered by intensity of exercise, and the more intense, the more hormone gets released.
Effect of low and high intensity exercise on circulating growth hormone in men
NE Felsing, JA Brasel and DM Cooper
Department of Pediatrics, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center,
Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, Vol 75, 157-162,

Typical variation in growth hormone secretion throughout the day, illustrating the especially powerful effect on secretion caused by strenuous exercise, and illustrating also the high rate of growth hormone secretion that occurs during the first few hours of deep sleep.
Textbook of Medical Physiology, 7th edition, Guyton & Hall, p. 889

However, the burning of fat from the hormone trigger is delayed 14-48 hours.
Mark D. Schuenke, Richard P. Mikat, Jeffrey M. McBride.

Effect of an acute period of resistance exercise on excess post-exercise oxygen consumption: implications for body mass management. European Journal of Applied Physiology Issue: Volume 86, Number 5, March 2002, pp. 411 17
Gillette CA, Bullough RC, Melby CL

Post exercise energy expenditure in response to acute aerobic or resistive exercise.
Int J Sport Nutr. 1994 Dec; 4 (4):347 60.

The next factor is TYPE of exercise.
Since hormones work on waves, as in circadian rhythm, (ex: sleep cycles, menstrual cycles) then it would make sense to exercise on a wave-like pattern interval training.

Sustained (same pulse rate) exercise works against the normal rhythms of the body. Kamath et al., 1991 Yamamoto et al., 1991

Short bouts of intense exercise activates more fat burning hormone (growth hormone). Sustained exercise activates more cortisol (stress) hormone. Cortisol can nullify growth hormone, canceling out the effects.
The next factors are duration and frequency.

There seems to be an optimum duration of exercise between 25-40 minutes. And since your body does the burning during the RECOVERY cycle, exercising every other day is best.

[resource1]