Hey, gang. This is Aleks, your friendly neighbourhood, director of Toronto Dance Salsa. I love today’s question because it’s personal to me. A big portion of my life, I used to be overweight. And I started my health journey weighing in at almost 200 pounds.
I was 196lbs (88.9kg) and I have dropped and maintained over 50lbs (22.6kg). As of writing this blog, my current weight is a hundred and 143.8lbs (65.22kg) and hey, 0.8lbs (0.36kg) the fact that I know that, show you how serious I am now about my health.
It all counts. So the short answer is, yes, you can lose weight doing Salsa, but I want to be very clear with you of how that can happen.
I looked up the stats and for 60 minutes of Salsa dancing. You can burn anywhere from 191 calories, depending on your weight, to 300+ calories.
Awesome right? You get to do something fun, something exciting, and meet cool people in the process.
I want to be honest with you, I was dancing for a long time, dancing at Salsa nightclubs up to six times a week when I was a student and I was still overweight.
Here are some things to help you on your journey.
How do you want to feel in your body?
That’s something I had to really answer with myself on my journey.
Definitely, I was unhappy. I remember when I weighed 196lbs (88.9kg), I remember getting out of bed, feeling depressed, feeling sad. I walked up to the mirror and I see this bloated corpse of a man puffy cheeks, dark circles under the eyes. I was just unhappy, unhappy with what I had caused to myself.
And so I started to do transformation and and as I started to go social dancing and I started to lose the weight and not overeat. I started to just feel lighter on the dance floor and off the dance floor. People started to just interact with me differently, it was such an amazing journey as I dropped all that excess weight and dancing was a massive part of it for my mental health.
People are so supportive on the dance floor and when they started to see me transform, they would cheer me on. That reinforced how I felt about my body.
Watch how many calories you consume:
No matter what level of activity you do, if you’re eating more calories than your body can burn you’ll gain weight. Period…it sucks but it’s true. It’s like you are collecting more money than you can spend (money-wise that sounds awesome) weight and calorie-wise not so much…
My active lifestyle, nightclub dancing made me feel it’s ok every night to go to McDonalds, snack more, eat a large pizza by myself…yes I did that many times.
So, no matter my level of activity, my body couldn’t burn off those excess calories.
So it’s not about what you put into your effort outside, it’s about what you put into your body.
There are a lot of ways to track, lower calories from intermittent fasting, to calorie counting apps and maybe I will write another blog on that but it doesn’t matter the method you pick.
Just know that as many as you can burn in 1 hour of dancing, if you want to see a change, eat less. 🙂
The nights I danced, I could see the results the next day: *Caution*
I am not saying that you go to a class or to a nightclub and bam, suddenly I lost a bunch of weight.
Salsa dancing as you go from beginner to intermediate requires more of your body involved (from basic turns to dips) and so you will see more results as you get better.
This depends on your activity too. If you are already super active, fit vs this is the first thing you are happy to commit to and you have a desk job.
You will see different results.
Definitely, on the nights that I would go social dancing at the beginning of my weight loss journey, I saw more results. It is a great activity because for me personally, for the longest time, I was a guy who never liked to go to the gym.
I was a guy who didn’t like to go running and I made all the excuses.
Salsa just helped me look at being active in a fun and engaging way
Just the fact that you go outside, you get to socialize on a consistent basis, you get to be upright, not just sitting down because most people have a job where they’re sitting and in the process have fun will do wonders for you.
I have had the pleasure of seeing many of my own students, who would come in and not be at the place where they want to be with their body, go through beautiful transformations because they found something that was fun and that inspired them to work on themselves outside the dance floor too.
Salsa is a great dance to start with not just to be more active but also to teach you that you are the type of person who is active.
BUT don’t forget!!!
You do burn calories in Salsa and I get a chance to meet you on the dance floor at our studio in person someday.
Remember if you have more questions please contact me! There are so many more tips that I want to share with you! If you have a question, please message me on Instagram (torontodancesalsa), on Twitter (#torontodancesalsa), on Facebook (Toronto Dance Salsa) or email me at [email protected].
