To lose weight and get in shape, you need to eat well and exercise regularly to burn fat. The first thing you need to understand about exercise is that just because you're burning calories doesn't mean you're burning fat. When you exercise, your main focus should be on losing body fat, and you can't lose body fat just by burning calories. When we exercise, our bodies start burning calories, but the calories burned are calories from carbohydrates in our system. In order to burn calories from stored fat, your body needs the presence of oxygen. There is a certain amount of oxygen that your body needs to start burning fat, and the only way to gauge how much your own body needs is to keep up with your target heart rate during exercise. Please be aware that if you continue to burn calories from carbs alone, you will lose mostly "water weight" which will lower your metabolism. Also, think of the calories burned from carbs as your energy calories. If you lose too many energy calories, your muscles won't get enough energy to increase your metabolism, which indirectly burns fat. Therefore, you need to increase your calorie intake when you are on an exercise program to replace the energy calories burned.
Burning fat calories during exercise
During aerobic exercise, your body goes through several stages before it reaches the point where you burn fat. You will hear people say that in the first 10 minutes of exercise you only burn sugar (carbs), not fat. This is true to some extent. I say this because you will still be burning sugar after 10 minutes if you are not exercising hard enough to make your body want more oxygen; or you're exercising too hard and can't supply your body with enough oxygen to burn fat. When you exercise, you need to move at an even pace (not too fast, not too slow) so that your body uses your stored fat (not carbs or sugar) as an energy source. Also remember that just because you've reached the fat burning phase doesn't mean you're going to stay there. Again, staying in a fat burning phase depends on moving at a pace that is right for your body. Make sure you are in your target heart rate range.
Burning fat calories at rest
Anaerobic strength training is the only way you can continue to burn fat calories an hour after you finish exercising. Strength training is the key to burning fat at rest. Strength training is an anaerobic activity that causes you to burn more calories than aerobic exercise. The calories you burn during weight training are mostly carb calories (meaning you have to eat even more calories per day to get energy); but the calories you burn at rest are mostly fat calories. The reason you burn fat at rest is because strength training increases your metabolism, which uses your stored fat for energy.
To make your body the perfect fat-burning machine, you need aerobic (cardio) and anaerobic (strength training) exercise.
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