Basically the title. I saw this thing about how much you have to exercise to burn off certain foods and was wondering how your body burns so many calories by doing nothing.
In: 160
Your body is never doing “nothing”
You have a “basal metabolic rate” whish is the required calories to just function.
Body functions, breathing, liver, kidney, brain, heart etc – all require energy.
That’s about as much as I understand it!
Your body is always burning calories to run its basic functions – keep your organs doing their job, keep your body warm, etc. If you think about it, running a mile takes like 8-10 minutes and that burns an extra 5% over your entire day’s baseline. If you jogged for an hour, you’d burn 600-700 calories.
Well, it is not doing nothing. We are warm blooded animals, and the body gives off about 100 W to keep us warm. That comes from different activities needed to keep us alive (breathing, digesting) but also from the the brain: your brain uses a large amount of glucose, about 1/5 of your daily calories.
The surprising part is the muscles are so efficient. But they need to be. If moving for hunting or gathering food needed much more energy we would have gone extinct a long time ago.
2000 (ish) calories is just what you need for doing the normal stuff you do day to day. The amount of energy you burn just existing and walking around and making poop and thinking and whatnot. The body is a very inefficent machine when you think about it.
Muscles on the other hand are pretty efficient at using the juice you make… It takes a pile of movement to use it up.
Your body burns calories just being alive and doing normal stuff. Kind of like how a car will burn gas while idling and not moving.
“Doing nothing” is actually the majority of your energy use. [According to Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basal_metabolic_rate), “skeletal muscle” (think of this as the muscle you use on purpose, as opposed to your heart and digestive muscles) only accounts for 18% of your daily calorie use. Your liver uses 27%, brain uses 19%, kidneys use 10%, and heart uses 7%. The rest of your organs use another 19%.
Since your muscles don’t use that much energy, relatively speaking, it doesn’t use that much *more* energy to use them *more.* If you use your muscles three times as much as you usually do, you’re still not increasing the total amount of energy used by your body by that much.
Plus, running a mile isn’t actually all that much work. Even if you’re in pretty bad shape, you should be able to run a mile in under 15 minutes, which is just 1% of your day. Using your muscles extra hard for one extra percent of your day simply doesn’t make that big a dent.
I know this is most likely BS made up by my mom to encourage me to exercise but I choose to believe it anyway.
When you get moving and get the blood pumping, it gets all your insides working far more effectively, gets your digestive system moving at a far better rate and puts everything into an “active” state. When you sit around all day your body is in an idling state, everything moves slower and blood flow is generally way lower.
How many times does your heart beat every day?
How many times do you breath per day?
How many little movements of your hands, arms, legs, abs..etc are there per day?
How much brain activity is constantly running?
What about the movement of your stomach, and intestines?
All the metabolic activity that keeps your body heated to a toasty 98.6 degrees all day amd all night, every day?
Your body does all kinds of shit 24/7, and every bit of it requires energy.
There is a background calorie count per hour just sitting there breathing using muscles in normal way. Running a mile burns 100 over the background usage.
You’re breathing right? Pumping blood? Thinking? Digesting? Fighting germs? Moving your eyeballs?
That’s not free energy.
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