How does your body burn 2000 calories a day without any effort, but running a mile only burns 100 calories?
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You use energy to breathe, to keep your heart beating, to maintain all your weight at 37°C, to keep your brain working. On top of all that energy expenditure, moving your body a mile is chump change.
Half of your calories go to running your brain.
And your heart beats constantly, which is a lot of effort.
And your chest expands and contracts constantly so you breathe.
If your body stopped putting in effort you would die very quickly.
Most of the calories burned are just maintaining body temperature, pumping blood, and breathing. That’s around 1300 calories per day on average. The rest of the daily average is your daily movement.
The reason running a mile is only 100 calories or so is because it is only 15-20 minutes of moving your weight along the ground, and human evolution made us remarkably efficient at it. You only burn slightly more running than walking because roughly the same amount of work is being done in a physics sense. Plus the more you run the more efficient your body gets.
Your bodily functions run 24 hours per day. Running for 24 hours ~~which is impossible as far as i know,~~ would be 9600 additional calories. So it’s not really a matter of how little calories you burn running, but more that it is just a small amount of time comparatively.
Edit – see below
Keeping all your muscles and organs running and alive takes a ton of energy, more than you’d think. And humans are adapted to be very efficient at running, taking less energy for a mile than you’d think.
For example, your brain itself burns 20% of the calories you eat. So with 2000/day that’s 400 cal just to keep your brain functioning for a day. Makes sense though, it’s constantly sending out nerve signals and processing data from thousands of sensors.
The 100 calories is for an average 150 lb person, and this is above your normal energy consumption.
If your assumption of 2000 calories a day (BMR) is correct, that’s what you burn just sitting around. So your normal sitting around self burns 83 calories an hour or 13.8 calories in ten minutes.
If you run (jog) a ten minute mile you’ve burned 100 calories above the normal 13.8 calories you would have burned on the couch….so that’s quite a bit more energy burned….a factor of 8.25 times more.
So it’s not really “only” 100 calories….it’s 8.25 your normal energy expenditure.
Because those are the respective amounts of energy required to do those activities.
If you’re asking because you feel worn out and exerted after running a mile but surprised you’ve only burned 100 calories this is because 100 calories is a fair amount to burn in the relatively short time it takes to run a mile, compared to how long a day is.
Some numbers:
2000 calories a day is about 1.4 calories per minute.
Running a mile takes maybe 10 minutes at a jog, varying a fair bit by fitness.
So you burn 10 calories a minute for that mile, or around an 800% increase on your regular metabolism while you’re running. That’s a fair bit. Most folks can’t keep that up for long.
Others have explained well but just to keep perspective running a single mile is pretty easy with minimal practice. For a late middle aged casual runner like myself, that’s about how long it takes to get warmed up. People who don’t have running experience way over estimate what a feat a single mile is. Casual runners often go 6 plus miles and a minimum of 3 for early before work runs. Not a license to eat anything you want but enough to burn meaningful calories.
2000 calories/day = about 14 calories in 10 minutes.
If you are running at 6 mph then you can do a mile in 10 minutes, and would burn about 130 calories using the same measurements as above.
So even at the pace of a light jog you are burning 10x the amount of calories that you would otherwise do sitting down.
>running a mile only burns 100 calories
100 Additional calories.
You also burned however many calories you would have during that same period of time if you had not been running.
And that is also dependent on your level of fitness. Someone who’s really out of shape is likely burning more calories during that run because it will take them longer.
Calories burned = effort over time. The longer time you’re putting in that effort, the more calories you will burn.
Your body tries not to use excess energy. In fact, exercise affects the total number of calories burned in a day less than you might imagine. There has been some interesting research on this
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