How does your body burn 2000 calories a day without any effort, but running a mile only burns 100 calories?
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There are 2 things:
1. Keeping you alive takes a lot of effort. Breathing, pumping blood, growing hair, sweating and many other things. It all takes effort. And, most of the body systems cannot stop. And they are not allowed to fail either. It all has to function or you are, in many cases, dead or severely sick.
2. There is a perception issue here too. 100 is more than you think. It is 5%.
I’ll you use the numbers you have provided. 100 cal is a 5% increase in your(2k) caloric need. Assuming you run something like 3 miles instead(which is a bit more reasonable for people who workout regularly) that is %15 increase over your base maintenance level. Think of having a raise of 15% to your salary or having to pay 15% more for your groceries.
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.
Let’s say it takes you 15 minutes to run a mile. There are 24 hours a day, which is 96 times 15 minutes, so per 15 minutes, doing nothing burns 2000/96 which is about 21 calories.
So running consumes almost 5 times more energy than not running.
Your body still does a bunch of work when not running (pumping blood, breathing, digesting, filtering, regulating temperature, destroying cells, creating new cells), it has to take some amount of energy.
All in all it’s not that surprising that staying alive takes energy and running while staying alive takes a bunch more energy.
This question helped me lose 50 lbs. I knew my calories burned and I figured out my calories intake. When I was 300 calories shy of my burned calories I said to myself I could have that cookie or potatoe chips then workout OR I could just stop eating for the day. I hate working out. Lost an average of 1 or so lbs a week.
It takes 7 – 12 minutes to run a mile depending on skill, so lets say 10.
If you’re burning 2000 calories per day (varies by person / other factors) then you are burning 13.8 calories every 10 minutes.
Assuming you burn 100 calories on a mile run: (Again varies.)
That means when you go for a 10 minute run, you’re burning 113.8 calories, and only a small portion of that is your “daily caloric burn rate”.
So about 87% of the energy you spend during that mile run is exerted specifically on the run, and 13% on maintaining baseline body functions etc.
It might sound hopeless to do exercise, but you must remember how much time there is in a day, you only burn 1.38 calories per minute (at a rate of 2000/day), you can burn much more doing exercise during that same period.
You’re basically a sack of water. It takes a lot of energy to keep an uninsulated sack of water at 100 degrees F all day. Try keeping a 150lb sack of water at bath temperature for any length of time. You’re likely going to instinctively burn something to keep the water warm. That’s what your body is doing. Slow and controlled burning to keep that sack of water at operating temperature.
In short: chemical energy is way more efficient and energetic than mechanical energy. It takes a surprisingly small amount of work to move 150lbs of water than to keep it a constant temperature.
Every breath you take,
And every move you make,
Every bond you break,
Every step you take,
…you’ll be burning calories
>without any effort
Is probably the biggest understatement of basal metabolic rate I’ve ever seen. Your body puts in an incredible amount of effort to keep you alive, even if you do nothing but sit still. Energy is still needed to keep your organs running and the most expensive one, your brain, working as intended.
Running a mile takes maybe 10 minutes. Burning those other 2000 calories takes 24 hours.
Basically you burn 1.4 calories a minute just existing. So if you run a mile, you’re burning a significantly higher number of calories in the minutes it takes you to complete the mile. But it’s still not a whole lot compared to the other 23+ hours of the day.
Think of it like gasoline: if you drive to the corner store which takes you ten minutes round trip, your car will burn less gas than if you left it idling in your driveway for 24 hours.
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