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
“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.
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