Why can’t we eat and lose calories.. LOL
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Just living uses up most of the calories we consume every day. Our bodies are remarkably efficient at doing physical activities, which is why it takes so much work to burn extra calories.
You can eat and lose weight without doing any additional exercise as long as you consume fewer calories than you burn.
>Why can’t we eat and lose calories.. LOL
Your body is a bioreactor that constantly transforms stuff into other stuff, pumps stuff from one thing into a different thing, opens and closes valves, sends tons of electrical impulses everywhere and needs to keep itself toasty at a very exact temperature in order for all these other processes to work.
That requires a lot of energy input.
That’s the baseline fuel requirement for your body. Physically moving your *limbs* around surely factors into it, but just to a very small degree. Accordingly, moving your limbs around *a bit more* does not increase your energetic requirements by a lot.
2000 calories a day is around 80 calories an hour. You use less while sleeping, so guesstimate about 100 calories per hour while you’re awake.
Say you run a mile in, say, 10 minutes (approx 2x walking pace), that’s working at 600 calories an hour or 6x your body’s rest work rate. Run that mile in a much brisker 6 minutes and you’re at 10x your body’s rest work rate.
The reason you only burn around 100 calories running a mile is because you’re only running for a short time of the day.
The reason it feels like a lot of work to run a mile is that even at a gentle pace you’re operating at many times your rest work rate.
For calorie burn, unless you’re rather fit and can run a 10k, the most realistic option for most people to burn calories is a modestly sustained increased work rate for a long duration – eg hikes or some sort of sport where you’re moving around a fair bit for a long duration with intermittent rest, Eg soccer.
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It takes a lot of energy to sustain 80-100kg of human at 37C for 24 hours, especially if moving, outside, subject to wind etc.
And not just 37 average but it literally can’t let even one body part dip too far for too long.
While there it has to fuel chemical reactions just to breathe, and keep your lungs and heart moving constantly. No to mention keeping digestion going and fighting off infections constantly and replenishing every cell that dies.
And that’s when you’re just laying in bed asleep. When you want and want to move, think and perform actions, your energy usage rises enormously.
But most importantly heat. Even a 500W heater on constantly would struggle to maintain that temperature above room temperature for the mass involved.
About 1200 calories is required to keep your heart beating, lungs pumping, brain functioning, and body temperature constant. If you laid down and didn’t move a centimeter all day, you’d use that much. The other 800 calories is all of your daily activities (movement, digestion, etc).
Along with all the comments here about our baseline calorie expenditures, Humans are basically nature’s best long distance runners. From standing upright, thus giving us a long stride and the elasticity in our legs being very good at directing kinetic energy to our breathing and ability to sweat and keep our bodies cool during physical activity. Are we the fastest? No. Our prey could easily outrun our prehistoric ancestors – in the short run. But track and chase it long enough and that deer is going to run out of gas. But not us. Our body has evolved to be so effecient at running that we can go miles chasing a meal and it wouldn’t kill us. It’s why if you really want to burn fat, you need to strength train in tandum with diet and cardio. Muscles take a lot of energy – the most out of any other tissue i your body – to maintain and raises your resting calorie expenditure, which it will get from stored energy in fat. Pump some iron, eat your chicken and spinnach.
Humans are THE most efficient long-distance runners of the animal kingdom. Lots of things can out-run us over short distances, but a fit human can keep going until the prey is exhausted. It’s what we do best. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that we’re energy-efficient at it.
a lot of people don’t burn that many calories. as a petite woman, my BMR is only around 900. but the reason is because all your metabolic and vital life functions burn calories. your body is working all day long
Just existing is what burns up most of those 2000 calories , breathing , thinking , and what not all burn calories
Not to mention we are wildly efficient at making the energy molecules for muscle movement , movement has to be efficient as a hunter especially the kind humans are. Ever notice that humans are not particularly fast for “hunter” species? But there’s one thing we can do , and that’s go far. Human muscle systems are so dang efficient we can technically outrun most animals eventually , so just cardio doesn’t burn much energy for us , but adding more body to our body makes a huge change in the daily needs. This is why a 6’5 guy can eat way more and never gain weight compared to a 5ft gal even if she’s way more active then him.
There’s also the aspects of metabolism to consider and your genetics can play a role too
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