How does your body burn 2000 calories a day without any effort, but running a mile only burns 100 calories?
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Calories are like gas in your car. If you leave your car running all day without ever pushing down the gas pedal, your gas level will still go down.
Not the perfect example, but exercise is like pushing down the gas pedal. You use extra calories doing this. But the 2000 calories per day is like the gas that would be used just idling.
Your brain, digestive system, nervous system, heart, etc. all need fuel, even if you slept all 24 hours of the day. Just like a car needs gas to idle, or else it will not run.
Your body needs calories to operate all day, for almost a century straight. If you ran or exercised strenuously all day, I’m sure it would also require a lot of extra calories. But a 30 minute spurt of exercise typically isn’t enough to make you burn a significant amount.
And this is a good thing, overall. Or else an even higher amount of people would be dying of starvation every day. Only in certain places and times have people had the issue of having too many calories.
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