Why can’t we eat and lose calories.. LOL
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When you wake up and get out of bed you burn calories. When you laid there dreaming you burnt A LOT of calories. Just the human body staying alive requires many calories a day. Even if your in a coma just breathing.
Our brains evolved to crave those calories .. fats and sweets mainly, because not so long ago in our evolution a meal could be days in between so it’s engrained in us to get as many calories in us as possible.
It should also be mentioned that running a single mile isn’t very difficult if you have any running experience. Maybe ten minutes of effort at an easy pace for typical recreational runners. Most consider 3 miles short and 6 plus as medium to long. Let’s not discuss competitive runners. I think the perception of a mile being tough comes from being young kids forced to do a mile in school with virtually no training.
Good answers here, but I’d like to add that our brains use a lot of our energy, about 20% of our energy goes there.
On the flip side, go run for an hour and you’ll burn an extra like 800 calories which lets you eat almost 50% more, as massive amount
“Why cant we eat and lose calories” – you actually do lose calories while eating. All those muscles that contact, it means tons of electrical signals, tons of channels being opened and closed and all of that requires energy, then there is secreting juices for digestion which also requires energy, then transfer of aminoacids, sugars and fats to the liver and to the rest of the body, then processes of synthesis.
AS i’ve said, electrical signals are just bunch of channels being opened and closed and ions changing positions in the cell, but it requires insane amount of energy. Now can you imagine brain with 86 billion neurons and how much energy it requires just to keep functioning ? Even though brain is responsible for the 2% of the weight, it uses 20% of the daily energy.
Most of the calories you burn go toward basic life/maintenance. Making new proteins, moving molecules around in your cells, cell division, all that stuff. This is happening constantly in your entire body and needs a ton of energy.
Running is actually quite easy for your body and is only a little bit of extra energy on top of all that, so it only requires a few extra calories relative to what you burn just to survive the rest of the day.
The sole purpose of breathing is to provide the oxygen to burn stuff. You breathe faster while working out, but the additional number of breaths taken compared to sitting around is relatively small, especially when considering a full day vs an hour of working out.
Absolutely agree, you need 2000 calories if you are grown up man with 8 hours of Manual labor. This data was collected in 60-70th. Nowadays office/home workers need only around 1500 calories.
Also, humans are built to eat once a day or even less, and that’s with running and hunting included, so for efficiency that’s the baseline and everything else is highly optimized.
Humans are extremely energy efficient. Running and walking is extremely energy efficient method of movement for humans. Our bodies evolved to do it. How to move around you need a fairly small amoutn of your cells; however every single cell in your body has to use energy to stay alive. That is what it really boils down. Everything from digestion to breathing takes quite bit of energy and you do it way more than runing.
If you truly want a form of exercise that burns lots of energy, go swimming. Our bodies aren’t meant to swim. We don’t have naturally bouancy, nor can you rest against anything in water. When you stand with the correct posture your all your body needs to do is to hold the head on top of the spine, spine straight, and legs straight and you transfer your whole body weight down to your heels. After that it is just minute adjustments for balance. However in water, you have nothing to transfer your body weight to, if you stop moving and adjusting you sink. Because in water all parts of your body has equal resitance against movement, all of your muscles will have to engage to adjust your body.
However humans can drop the calorie requirements dramatically. In high stress situations like in a cold environment and low food supply your whole body will just basically start to be in a form of hibernation. However you will also start to gain weight as body wants to put everything it can in to reserves.
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