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
To add to others comments, your brain is something like 20% of calories burned. There are other organs that use calories as well that are (mostly) not associated with physical exertion. So only a portion of your body is increasing it’s calorie use.
Imagine a car with the engine running 24/7 but parked up, thats your body always burning fuel. If you were to drive a mile, it would burn a little more.
Grab a stress ball in each hand. Squeeze one fully as quickly as you can and then squeeze the other. Try to keep up a rhythm of about .8 seconds between each squeeze.
See how long you can keep that up.
That’s not too far away from what your heart does every second of every day with no breaks.
Your brain has to fire off chemical reactions to consider this, as well as run all of your bodily systems before during and after your consciousness considering things. That takes power to do.
All those bodily functions also require power to do their work (mostly) from digesting your food to making more cells to fighting off invaders to making sure all your secretions get where they need to go to just keeping you body heat at a survivable temperature.
If you look at all the work your body does on a day where you don’t even get out of bed it’s much more puzzling how a resting human body can accomplish all that on half of a Denny’s grand slam a day.
Heat.
Your body temperature is 37deg C, comfortable room temperature is 20 ish degrees, that’s a big difference to make up.
Brain
Our brains burn a huge pile of cal. It’s why it’s such a unique adaption, as it’s a HUGE investment in calories that can’t be shut off.
Compare this to a street dog that can go weeks on a bit of pizza crust
How does a car cost $20,000 but you have to drive 60 miles to cost $20 extra? 😉
keeping a human body alive burns a surprising amount of calories. takes more effort to burn more than your basal metabolic rate, or else we’ll have to be constantly taking in more energy
Your body makes tons of heat, heart beats, cells die and get replaced, your brain needs lots of energy to keep working, lungs work constantly.
Your marrow makes blood all day, your gut works hard to digest food, your muscles do hard work to keep in shape.
You are never “doing nothing”. Your body is constantly regulating temperature, breaking down and using the food and air consumed to sustain itself. It’s incredibly complicated, and uses energy (quantified by “calories”) to complete and sustain all these processes. From breathing to blinking, thinking, replacing skin cells and repairing injuries… innumerable actions happen at a cellular level to keep you alive as you do “nothing”.
A very rough calculation of “how much energy you need to keep 80 kg of water at a temperature of 37 degrees during 24 hours in an environment at about 20 degrees” gives you, very roughly, an expense of about 1500 calories.
So the rest of what you’re doing in the whole day (all the body functions) cost you, roughly, about 1000 calories. that’s seems to make sense.
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