Fiction: You have to burn at least 500 calories per workout to lose weight. Fact: One of the worst inventions to lose fat was the calorie counting stairmaster, exercise machines, and treadmills.

Millions of men and women are now obsessed about how many calories they burn per workout, because of these inventions. You're probably one of these people, watching every calories as it creeps up ever so often during a slow cardio workout. Without taking to mind that you can wipe out a thirty-minute, 300-calorie cardio session with one mouthful of a glazed donut. There are far too many people being mislead to believe that if they don't burn 300-500 calories per workout, then they will not lose weight. After all, isn't this what you've been told over and over again in those shinny stylish fashion/fitness magazines?

There are many problems with this kind of approach to weight loss. For the record, it's hard to tell if the calorie counter machines are even accurate enough. One story on CBS news proved that calorie counting machines overestimated calorie burning numbers up to twenty percent!

If you are still depending on slow cardio for progressive fat loss, you will find that it is relatively useless and at the very least, ineffective. It will take a long time for you to burn a large number of calories and one study has shown that men who only used cardio workouts for fat loss ended up with a lower resting metabolic rate. By only depending on cardio you will basically undo the calorie burning you are trying to achieve. On the other hand, men in the same study that used weight training did not undergo a lower metabolism.

So what is the recommendation to losing fat in a faster and more effective way? The answer is to use weight lifting and interval workouts to burn less calories in less exercise time, but with a high intense form of training.

Your body will burn greater amounts of calories after exercise using intervals than it would after doing slow cardio and your metabolic rate will stay high. A fair amount of experts call this method the "after burn effect". So how are you supposed to do intervals, you may ask? Well, you could do a sprint for thirty seconds and rest for ninety seconds and redo that for six sets - using the bicycle is preferred or the treadmill if you are familiar with it.

Within that short time span the interval training will cause your muscles to go wild with energy. I like to call it a metabolic turbulence. This insane metabolic boost causes lots of calories to burn after exercise to get your body back under control. The results will cause you to burn more calories and fat in the post exercise period as your body attempts to get things back to normal.

Now there is a single time that you would want to count your calories, but that is only when you are counting up to determining how many calories you take in per day. Remember, you can wipe out an entire calorie burning workout in less than one minute just by eating junk food. Without some discipline and structure in your nutrition, there is nothing that any program can do to help you lose weight. So there you have it, workout nutrition discipline and interval training. These are the two anti-calorie counting methods that will help you get lean by losing fat.

About the Author

James S. Wallace http://www.yourhealthevolution.com/