A lot of people, especially those trying to stick to their New Years Resolutions, seem to think doing any form of exercise justifies a McDonalds. I'm afraid to say it really doesn't.

While doing some exercise is always better than doing none, it's extremely important that you are honest with yourself and have an understanding of how many calories you are actually burning.

The way you should work this information, goes back to one of our first posts, counting calories. In this post we calculated a basic figure of our daily calorie need but obviously that amount can increase if we are doing exercise in that day, but by how much?

This is where we need to be careful about how much we are overestimating our exercise. For example, half an hour of Yoga, in a person that weighs about 70kg is only 149 calories. A normal class is usually an hour so that's just under 300 calories spent doing exercise, not quite enough to justify a Big Mac!

Calculate your daily calorie needs using the first article we published and then if you do exercise, try to track and calculate the change in those needs for the days you exercise. Here's a great link that you can use to measure your calories used and includes every day activities around the house as well as exercise. Unfortunately it is an American website so makes use of Pounds rather than stone or kilograms but as a basic concept, 1 Pound, in weight, is equal to 0.45kg.

Enjoy and most importantly be honest with yourself.

Ciao for now x