Increased cardio but still feel fat? Why the bigger problem is being sedentary.
The scale has decided it's done moving, your jeans fit the same as they did three weeks ago, and you're standing in your kitchen at 10pm googling "why is my weight loss stuck?" like the internet is going to say something you haven't already read four hundred times.
And within about two clicks, you land on the same answer everyone lands on: do more cardio.
So now you're doing cardio five, six days a week. You've joined your gym's “Hybrid Rockstar”class. You know the drill by heart now, you've got a rowing PB you're weirdly proud of, and you've started saying things like "engine work" unironically in conversation. Or maybe you’ve decided I’m going to run even more. Or bike three times around the island.
But the scale still isn't moving.
Here's the thing nobody tells you before you commit to a life of extra cardio sessions: exercise is actually the SMALLEST piece of the calorie-burning puzzle.
Read that again: The SMALLEST one.
So piling on more of the smallest piece while ignoring the bigger ones is a bit like trying to fix a leaking toilet by mopping the floor more aggressively. Sure, technically you're doing something. It's just not the something that's going to fix the actual problem.
Let me walk you through where your calories are actually going, because once you see this, the whole "just add more cardio" advice starts to look pretty damn silly.
The four ways your body burns calories. Ranked biggest to smallest.
Before we even get started: I’m going to have to state the obvious because apparently some people don’t know this:
What is a calorie? It’s not a type of food. It’s not some evil weight gain “voodoo molecule”. It’s JUST a unit of measurement for energy. Like metres for length. Kilograms for weight. Etc etc. That’s all it is. You eat, you consume energy. You move you expend energy. To SURVIVE, you will do both.
Ok. Lets go.
Your body burns calories in four categories every single day, whether you've set foot in a gym or not. Let's rank them biggest to smallest, because the order is genuinely the whole point of this article.
1. Basal metabolic rate (BMR): the heavyweight champion
This is just the cost of being alive. Heart beating, lungs breathing, liver doing whatever it is livers do, brain running the show, cells constantly repairing themselves in the background while you sleep, scroll Instagram, or stare into space wondering what’s the difference between jam and marmalade. #iykyk
BMR is roughly 60% of your total daily calorie burn. Sixty percent. Before you've done a single squat or taken a single step, you've already burned more than half your day's calories just by existing. That’s biology for you.
2. NEAT: the quiet overachiever nobody talks about
NEAT stands for Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis, which is just a fancy way of saying "everything you do that isn't a workout." Walking to the MRT. Fidgeting because you're bored in a meeting. Standing at the hawker centre stall waiting for your chicken rice. Pacing around your living room while you're on a call arguing with your bank or airline company. All of it adds up!
NEAT is the second biggest contributor to your daily burn, and here's the part that should annoy you a little: for most people, it burns more than their actual workout does. Yup. Your one-hour gym session is losing to the sum total of you just... moving around your day like a normal person. Humbling stuff.
3. Thermic effect of food (TEF): the forgotten cousin
Digesting food costs energy too. Protein is the most expensive to digest at around 25 to 30% of its own calories, carbs sit around 6 to 8%, fat is the cheapest at 2 to 3%. Averaged out, this is roughly 10% of what you eat.
Not huge, but again it adds up, and it's one more reason a higher protein intake tends to help with fat loss even before you factor in the muscle and satiety benefits.
4. Exercise: the smallest slice, and the one everyone obsesses over
And here we are. The one everybody fixates on. Your cardio, your weights session, your spin class where the instructor yells at you about "finding your why" while you're just trying to survive the next 45 seconds.
Exercise is, for most people, the smallest of the four categories. A solid hour of training might burn 300 to 500 calories depending on intensity and bodyweight. Sounds decent on its own. Stack it up next to 60% of your day just from existing and several hundred more from NEAT, and suddenly your workout looks less like the main event and more like a support act.
This is not me telling you training doesn't matter. It absolutely does, we'll get to why in a second. But if your entire fat loss strategy is "burn more calories in the gym," you're optimising the smallest lever you have while ignoring the two biggest ones.
So why does "just add more cardio" feel so right, even though it isn't?
Because the logic checks out in theory. More movement equals more calories burned equals more fat loss. Simple maths, right?
Except your body isn't a calculator. It's more like that one friend who, the second you ask them to do more, quietly starts doing less somewhere else so it all balances out. You add a cardio session, your body compensates by dialling back your NEAT without asking your permission or texting you a heads up.
You finish your extra cardio session feeling like you've conquered something, and then you sit for the rest of the day because you're knackered. You sit at your desk and go “I’ve done enough for today.”
None of this is a conscious decision on your part, it's just your body quietly protecting its energy reserves like it's prepping for a famine that isn't coming.
And the numbers on this are genuinely wild. NEAT can drop by up to 400 calories a day. Four hundred freaking calories. Gone. Vanished. While you're busy congratulating yourself for that brutal Hyrox class you just crushed.
So you add 300 calories of cardio, your NEAT quietly eats 300 calories elsewhere, and you land back at zero. Except now you're also more tired, hungrier, and spending an extra 4 hours a week at the gym for the privilege of breaking even. Looks like a DJT deal.
NEAT is basically your metabolism's “check engine” light.
Of all four categories, NEAT is the most reactive to how you're eating and feeling. When you're fed and energised, you naturally move more without even clocking it. You're restless, you fidget, you take the stairs because your legs actually want to. When you're deep in a deficit and running on fumes, your body clamps down on all of that. You conserve. You go still. This isn't you being lazy, it's biology doing exactly what it evolved to do when it thinks food is scarce.
This is also why two people can eat identical calories, train identically, and lose fat at completely different speeds. It's rarely the gym session making the difference. It's almost always what one of them is doing with the other 23 hours of their day.
And look, if you live in Singapore, the deck is a little stacked against you here. Everything is designed to minimise how much you move. Grab transport and delivery so walking becomes optional. We work at home more since Covid so there’s no need to walk to the train or bus stop.Weekends often just mean going from one mall to another. And the heat gives everyone a completely legitimate excuse to just stay indoors and do nothing, which to be fair, it IS hot AF.
None of this is a personal failing. It's just the environment. It’s the cards we have been dealt. So do we fold? Or do we play our best hand?
But it does mean your baseline NEAT here is probably lower than you think, which is exactly why it's worth protecting on purpose instead of leaving it to chance.
Don’t believe me? Track your steps when you’re travelling and sight-seeing. When you are not stuck with your current sedentary routine. I have clients that clock as many as 30,000 steps daily and don’t even feel it. That how little we move these days.
Also, can we talk about your fitness tracker for a second
Before we go further, I need to burst a bubble. That calorie number your Apple Watch, Garmin or Fitbit spits out after a workout? Treat it the same way you'd treat a stranger's dating profile. Take it with a healthy dose of scepticism.
Stanford ran a study on this in 2017. They tested seven popular wrist devices, Apple Watch, Fitbit Surge, Microsoft Band and others, on 60 people against indirect calorimetry, which is the actual gold standard lab method for measuring energy expenditure. Heart rate readings were solid, six of the seven devices were within 5% accuracy there. Calorie burn was an entirely different story. None of the seven devices got it right. The best performer was still off by 27% on average. The worst was off by 93%.
Ninety-three percent. So if your watch says you burned 500 calories, the honest range could be anywhere from around 260 to over 900. That's not a rounding error, that's basically a coin flip.
And the errors aren't random either, wearables consistently tend to overestimate rather than underestimate. Which means if you're using that number to decide you've "earned" a bigger dinner or an extra bubble tea, you're very likely working off an inflated figure and quietly undoing whatever deficit you thought you were in.
It gets worse depending on the activity too. Walking and running sit around a 30% error rate. Cycling and resistance training are often worse, sometimes over 50%, because the device is trying to guess your effort from your heart rate and wrist movement, and both of those get messy the second you're not swinging your arms in a nice predictable rhythm. I know that there are many newer trackers since then. But the same problem applies. To track how many calories you actually burn, requires a lot more real time data. Not just heart rate and activity.
The one thing these devices are genuinely reliable at is step counting, under 5% error on flat ground. Which, conveniently, is exactly the metric that matters most for everything we just talked about with NEAT. So use your tracker to keep an eye on your steps. Do not use it to negotiate your dinner portions based on a made-up calorie figure from your spin class.
Ok, but then what is the weights room actually for?
This is the bit that tends to flip a switch for people once they hear it.
Most people walk into the gym, pick up a barbell, and mentally file it under "calorie burning activity," same category as cardio. And sure, lifting burns some calories in the moment. But that's genuinely the least interesting thing it's doing for your body composition.
The actual job of resistance training, if your goal is fat loss, is to build and hold onto muscle so you can raise your BMR.
Remember BMR? The 60% slice? The biggest piece of the entire pie by a mile? Muscle tissue is metabolically expensive to maintain, meaning it costs your body energy just to keep it around, doing nothing, 24/7. The more muscle you carry, the higher that baseline burn is, permanently, including all the hours you're not anywhere near a gym.
A more muscular person burns more calories lying on the couch than a less muscular person of the exact same bodyweight lying on the same couch. That difference per day isn't enormous, but stack it across months and years and it becomes genuinely significant. You're not just burning calories in the session, you're upgrading the engine so it runs hotter even while it's parked.
This is why skipping weights in favour of more cardio, because "cardio burns more," is getting the entire equation backwards. Cardio burns some calories today. Muscle burns calories forever. One of those is clearly the better long-term investment.
Alright, so what do you actually do with all this
If the order of importance is BMR, then NEAT, then TEF, then exercise dead last, your strategy should look nothing like "panic and add more cardio." Try this instead.
Protect your NEAT.
Get a baseline step count from a normal week and defend it with your life while you're dieting. If you were doing 8,000 steps before you started cutting calories, don't let it quietly slide to 5,000 because you're tired. Your body will absolutely try that move on you.
Walk to the further coffeeshop. Take the MRT stairs. Get off a stop early. Walk up a flight of stairs. None of this feels like much in the moment. Across a week, it adds up more than you'd think.
Lift weights to build the engine, not to burn the session
Stop mentally scoring your gym session by how many calories it burned. That's not the point and never was. The point is the tissue you're building, which quietly raises your BMR for the long haul. Every rep is less about today's calorie count and more about permanently nudging your metabolism upward.
Don't crash diet
The harder and faster you cut calories, the harder your body slams the brakes on NEAT in response. A slower, more moderate deficit protects your daily energy expenditure and, ironically, tends to get you better results over a longer stretch, even though it feels less dramatic week to week. Patience isn't glamorous. It works though.
So wait, is cardio bad for fat loss then?
Cardio has its place. It's a very legitimate tool, especially when you've plateaued and want to create a bit more of a deficit without slashing food further. But it works best added in small, deliberate doses, not doubled overnight in a panic response to the scale not moving. Also, worth repeating, it shouldn’t be affecting your NEAT.
One or two moderate sessions when you actually need them, sensible. Turning yourself into a cardio bunny overnight while your NEAT quietly tanks in response, less sensible.
The bottom line
Most people have this entire hierarchy backwards. They obsess over exercise, the smallest slice of the pie. They ignore NEAT, which is quietly the second biggest and the most sensitive to how they're eating and feeling. They never think about BMR at all, despite it being the single biggest factor by a mile. And they treat the weights room as a calorie-burning session instead of what it actually is, which is a long-term investment in their metabolism.
More cardio isn't always the answer. Sometimes it actively works against you by tanking the NEAT that was already carrying more of your daily burn than the cardio ever could.
Move more throughout your actual day. Lift weights to build the engine. Use cardio deliberately, not as a panic button. And maybe stop trusting your watch's calorie count quite so much, it's doing its best but it's honestly not that reliable.
Not the sexiest advice you'll read today.
But it's the advice that actually works.
Want an approach to fat loss that actually makes sense?
At the PIT Singapore, we build fat loss plans around how your body actually works, not around how much you can sweat in an hour. Building muscle, protecting your metabolism, and making your whole day work for you. If you're done spinning your wheels (pun slightly intended), reach out to us.
Author: Henson Irving - PIT DIRECTOR
