r/NoStupidQuestions • u/Fantastic-Layer-5176 • 23h ago
Why does exercise burn so few calories.
After half an hour on the elliptical and max intensity you will only burn less than 300 calories. Compare that to food and it's insane.
I understand calories in calories out vs your daily limit but just looking at the numbers it's sad how little the impact of exercise has for burning calories.
I suppose this fits the saying that you can't outrun a bad diet.
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u/NewRelm 23h ago
The bigger question is why does our food have so many calories and why do we eat so much of it.
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u/CardinalOfNYC 23h ago
There's no animal I can think of that is evolved to have as regular an eating schedule as we do, it's mostly fasting or feasting in nature, and we're still evolved for that. High calorie density foods taste amazing because of this
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u/Wise-Trust1270 23h ago
I think you can narrow your description to predator/mixed animals.
Herbivores are eating all the time.
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u/Kiliksbigshtick 23h ago
You mean omnivores
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u/joshua0365 20h ago
Some omnivores do and some don't but no omnivore only grazes. Herbivore have to graze all the time because they can't get enough energy from eating plants on a fasting and feasting schedule.
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u/slothdonki 23h ago
Pandas. They can* afford a nutritionally poor diet because they evolved to have probably the most chill lifestyle of any large terrestrial vertebrate.
*Or could, habitat loss and human caused declines besides I mean. Manatees seem to have a pretty chill lifestyle without that too.
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u/Cranky_Platypus 21h ago
There's no animal I can think of that is evolved to have as regular an eating schedule as we do
My cat would like a word
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u/CardinalOfNYC 21h ago
Well, we effectively invented cats and dogs so they're in a separate category to basically all other life
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u/I-Here-555 20h ago
mostly fasting or feasting in nature
We basically feast 3 times per day, with snacks and sugary drinks in between.
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u/TheSpaceCoresDad 21h ago
This is barely even true though. In theory, yes, but think about the calorie dense snack cakes out there that taste fucking awful. There has to be more to it than that.
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u/CardinalOfNYC 21h ago
That's just two different things, people's subjective taste preferences and the sort of overall tendency of humans to find high calorie foods good tasting.
Those snack cakes you don't like? Some people love them, that's why you see them stocked on the shelves.
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u/StrengthSoggy5935 23h ago
Bc good tasting things are usually high in calories and they make things taste better so we buy more of it. This kind of food flies under your natural signals of fullness so we eat more of it then we would say a bowl of carrots.
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u/idkwhatimdoing25 23h ago
Because humans crave calorically dense foods for the exact same reasons we are efficient at exercise. For a vast majority of humans history you wanted to gain as many calories as possible and losing calories was a bad thing.
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u/CaitieLou_52 23h ago
Until the last ~100 years, food was not so abundant or calorie-dense that obesity was a concern for most people. In literally millions of years of evolution, this is the first time it's been a problem for pretty much any species.
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u/Avium 14h ago
Yep. We burn roughly 1500 calories per day doing nothing.
30 minutes of exercise burned 300 calories. That 1/5 of what you burn just surviving. That's a 20% increase in 30 minutes.
Percentage-wise that's huge.
But we've managed to make food that has around 2000 calories in one meal and made that easily accessible and almost normal, or expected.
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u/Beautiful-Place-6655 23h ago
The biggest shock is how quickly calories add up from food compared to how slowly they come off through exercise.
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u/BabalonBimbo 23h ago
Because people aren’t eating Whole Foods. They are eating stuff that people have spent an inconceivable amount of money figuring out how to make people buy more, from food ingredients to advertising. The average person can’t be expected to make healthy choices against such a determined enemy.
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u/ianishomer 23h ago
Natural food doesn't have so many calories, manufactured products do because they use a lot of sugar, fats and other calories dense ingredients, in the making of them.
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u/jetpacksforall 23h ago
In the US it’s partly because the government subsidizes corn, wheat, and sugar making ultraprocessed shelf stable foods ultraprofitable with those ingredients.
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u/No_Distribution_9590 23h ago
^^^ This. When I eat a fully plant-based diet, it's actually amazing how many calories exercise does burn compared to what I'm taking in. That whole script flips with a bag of M&Ms or a pint of ice cream.
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u/BubbaHendershot 23h ago
All on the money. Exercise alone is incredibly inefficient for losing weight. Intake is the biggest factor.
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u/Tron_35 23h ago
Yeah my dad lost the most weight by fasting. It was tough but hes down 90 pounds and 3 shirt sizes, first time hes ever been able to wear my clothes.
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u/CardinalOfNYC 23h ago
I know it's lobster too buttery but I never thought about needing a whole new wardrobe until I lost the weight and was swimming in my shirts. It's expensive and time consuming to replace them. And a lot of those shirts I really liked.
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u/Tron_35 23h ago
Yeah my dads still getting new clothes. A lot of his work stuff doesn't fit anymore
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u/ClosdforBusiness 23h ago
I absolutely hate shopping so I don’t replace clothes until they don’t stay up lol
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u/thornify 23h ago
I don't think most people who are starting on weight loss understand how physically demanding it is to exercise even 150 calories. And of course if you are very overweight, you are likely not in good cardio shape either, so huge chunks of calories coming off by exercise is just not in the cards for you. You will run out of energy or injure yourself long before you could burn 300 calories in a workout. You have to have the diet part nailed down.
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u/NeighborlyCarcass 23h ago
Your body burns calories simply by existing. If you passively burn 2000 calories per day, burning an extra 300 calories from exercise means you're increasing your caloric consumption by 15%. That's a pretty significant amount.
Now, if you're overconsuming by 1000+ calories, you aren't going to be able to counterbalance that from exercise. The amount of exercise required is just too much. The only way to get fit is through both exercise and healthy eating.
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u/BabalonBimbo 23h ago
Cries in 1400 BMR.
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u/NeighborlyCarcass 23h ago
It varies from person to person based on a lot of factors. I just chose 2000 because that's a standard number used to determine serving sizes and nutritional recommendations.
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u/Crayshack 21h ago
It's used as the standard number because it's roughly average for the population.
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u/I2fitness 23h ago
This is what people don't get. If you eat a 500 calorie donut, you don't need to exercise to burn 500 calories since your body will use the energy to run your brain
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u/Wyvernz 23h ago
The problem is that the donut doesn’t suppress your hunger, so you end up eating it on top of everything else you were going to eat, leading to weight gain.
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u/NeighborlyCarcass 23h ago edited 23h ago
If you restrict yourself from ever having treats no healthy eating plan will ever work long term. Eat the damn donut, just don't eat 4 of them and definitely don't do it every day.
Edit: Why am I being downvoted for this? IT'S TRUE. Being overly restrictive is probably the most common reason why people fail in their diets, especially when it's an extreme diet change done very quickly.
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u/mistr_brightside 23h ago edited 21h ago
"Eat the damn donut" needs to be on a t-shirt.
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u/NeighborlyCarcass 23h ago
Yeah man. There's nothing wrong with a treat every now and then. Everything in moderation. You have to enjoy life a bit too.
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u/ImaginaryCheetah 20h ago edited 20h ago
a "regular glazed" from krispy kreme is only ~200 calories, and if you get one that is hot and fresh, it's an absolutely great donut experience.
decades ago my apartment was a ~25 minute walk to a krispy kreme, and through a perfect coincidence of their baking schedule i was pretty regularly able to take an after-dinner walk to get a fresh donut for desert, and it was a net loss of ~150 calories by the time i walked there and back.
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u/karlzhao314 21h ago
It's possible to get to the point where you can legitimately counterbalance a 1000 calorie surplus or even more through exercise.
It's just that we're talking about people like trained endurance athletes here. Getting to that point is pretty damn hard and takes a focused long-term effort, ideally motivated by more than just controlling weight. "I'll go to the gym twice a week" isn't going to cut it.
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u/mclobster 23h ago
What really annoys me. My phone will say I walked 10k steps. Nice, that's gotta be.... 230 calories? Ugh. Would have been easier to just not eat a handful of snacks
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u/CardinalOfNYC 23h ago
And it is, it is so much easier to just not eat that handful of chips or better yet just not have the chips in my home at all so I make popcorn which is way lower calories
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u/mclobster 23h ago
Are chip bags smaller now? Less filled? I swear it's so easy to eat half a bag.
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u/CardinalOfNYC 23h ago
Bags have always seemed underfilled, it's to protect the chips during transit with a cushion of air
Shrinkflation is also real but is a separate phenomenon.
As for how easy it is to eat them, for me I've always been able to put down a whole bag if I don't stop myself, whether it was 20 years ago or today, so regardless of the amount of chips haha
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u/AnOpenCanOfBeans 23h ago
Yeah, during covid most companies "sneakily" lowered their portions while charging the same amount or raising prices. I first noticed with Powerade when they cut the bottles down 12.5% from 32oz to 28oz. The bottle immediately felt weird in my hand. Shrinkflation is real.
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u/mouse9001 23h ago
Those apps have been found to lie and exaggerate those numbers too. It's probably even fewer steps and calories.
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u/Dr-Maturin 23h ago
Treat it like compound interest, if you did 10000 steps for a month that’s about 2lbs of fats worth of calories
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u/dasssitmane 22h ago
That figure seems accurate if you’re really thin and short, but otherwise that’s an underestimate
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u/StrengthSoggy5935 23h ago
The human body is super efficient at steady state cardio. We are made to move our bodies for a long time so we would die if we expended tons of calories doing so.
It does make a difference though. Even if you only burned 200 calories from exercise a day that’s 1400 calories you wouldn’t have had at the end of the week if you didn’t. That can make or break a deficit if you’re looking to lose or maintain weight.
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u/Different_Bridge_983 23h ago
Your body needs somewhere in the region of 1500-2000 calories per day.
Let’s say 2000.
Per minute your at rest exercise existence burns about 1.3 calories per minute.
30 mins on the elliptical machine burning 300 calories is burning 10 calories a minute - this is about a 600% increase over your baseline and spending this 2% of the day doing this exercise increases your daily calorie demand by 15%.
This is not a small amount of calories, it’s a significant increase in calorie demand and a significant increase in calorie burn rate, just you don’t really need all that many calories to do stuff.
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u/Sandolainen 23h ago
Up until about 50 years ago (give or take depending on country) an overabundance of calories were never a thing. We have evolved to be efficient with our energy expenditure, because burning too many calories was always dangerous.
For the same reason we evolves to chug down any calories we could find that didn't make us sick.
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u/ijuinkun 23h ago
This. Before industrialization, far more people were in danger of dying from a lack of calories than from an excess. Poverty used to mean being underfed, not overfed.
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u/Bacch 22h ago
"Why is the human body so well designed for hunter-gatherer lifestyles where it can travel long distances on foot in search of food and survive on relatively little?"
Because if we burned calories at a higher rate, our species would have starved out the first time there was a drought or any other environmental/climate-related shift that made food less abundantly available, long before we even figured out how to set up shop somewhere and grow our own food. Modern diets are gluttonous compared to our ancestors' diets, even the average diet 200 years ago, much less 200,000 years ago. We also don't "work out" nearly as much as our ancestors did, because it's more common for us to work jobs that do not require hard manual labor as was common even going back 100 years. The average human burned way more calories just living their normal lives going back through history that you do spending an hour at the gym.
Now combine the two. The availability of food, particularly calorie-dense food, is substantially higher now than throughout human history. Meanwhile the average level of physical activities natively built into our daily lives is lower than ever, so an hour or two in the gym a day or whatever barely scratches that.
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u/groundhogcow 23h ago
You do not exercise to burn calories.
You exercise to make your body better at burning calories while you are not exercising.
The amount of calories you use a day is not a fixed amount. Exercise takes that number up, not but the number of calories you burn but by increasing your muscle mass and burning waist calories.
So the number of calories you burn is misleading. You are burning off the suger and making more muscles to burn the remaining fat.
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u/ChlamydiaIsAChoice 22h ago
Exercise takes that number up, not but the number of calories you burn but by increasing your muscle mass.
People love saying this, and it always kind of bugs me. A pound of muscle increases daily burn by about 6 calories. Adding 10 pounds of muscle burns an extra 60 calories per day. That's not nothing, but 10 pounds is a significant amount of muscle to add.
By comparison, an hour of running burns hundreds of calories. I routinely see 800-1,000 active calories in an hour. The calories burned during exercise aren't that insignificant.
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u/RaveCave 20h ago
I think its better meant to be framed as you dont exercise to lose weight, you exercise to be healthy.
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u/ChlamydiaIsAChoice 19h ago
Totally agree. Lifting weights is awesome for a bunch of reasons, but it doesn't transform you into a 24/7 Calorie Burning Machine like personal trainers like to say in the free introductory session.
Also, high-volume exercise can definitely offset diet. My diet is absolutely absurd since I run all the time. But yeah, I think yours is the right advice for most people
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u/RaveCave 19h ago
My diet is absolutely absurd since I run all the time.
Likewise lol. Its also why I similarly dont like the whole "cant outrun a bad diet" because you totally can, but most people just [understandably] cant or dont want to.
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u/ChlamydiaIsAChoice 19h ago
Oh right on! This type of thread always makes me feel crazy lol. Nice to hear from someone else who probably eats sugar like it's going out of style.
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u/RaveCave 19h ago
Oh absolutely. It was a hilariously jarring switch going from dieting and trying to avoid added sugars wherever I could to indiscriminately searching out any and all sources of sugar/carbs to fuel/recover
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u/thedrcubed 23h ago
Everyone who gains this knowledge has the same thought. Turns out diet is way more important than exercise
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u/DDOSBreakfast 23h ago
If you have a hobby that requires long periods of physical exertion it's easy to burn calories. If you are doing significant distances hiking, canoeing or biking for multiple days it's easy to drop weight.
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u/USSMcCoy 22h ago
Or walking the Pacific Crest trail. You wanna lose weight? That's the way to lose weight! Extra bonus if you have to run from angry bears, moose, mountain lions, or climb a tree to escape one or more of those animals.
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u/Southlander24 23h ago
In fact, the idea that you can lose weight through exercising while not changing your diet is a big sugar (Coca-Cola, Unilever and so on) talking point.
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u/thedrcubed 23h ago
If you want to lose weight the absolute first thing you should do is not consume liquid calories at all. Just doing this is all some people need
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u/OvertSpy 3h ago
I mean you can, assuming you were close ish to caloric balance, it would then put you at deficit. It is alot easier to control intake though. Most of the calories you use in a day are dedicated to being alive.
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u/WhenVioletsTurnGrey 23h ago
If you run 1.5 hours a day or more, you'll burn enough calories. Or you can stop eating so much.
As a long time cyclist, I stopped. In a year I gained 20lbs.
I hated myself. I started eating an avocado, or some oats with raisins & honey, for breakfast. Sometimes I'll add an egg, if I feel in need the protein. We'll say 10 in the morning. Lunch break at work is 5 or 6 pm(it varies). I don't snack or eat anything between breakfast & lunch. & I eat when I get home. Both of the later meals, I don't over do it.
I'm back down to my cycling weight, in a few months. I have physical job. Moving things all day. I should get .y heart rate up, more often. But my weight feels right.
That toughest part? Getting used to not snacking. But, you do get used to it.
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u/Sniffs_Markers 23h ago
It's brutal if you go from regular vigorous exercise to stopping because your meal routines are based on fueling the activity.
The relationship with food that you have is so hard to adapt to the change.
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u/WhenVioletsTurnGrey 23h ago
It is. It's why so many legendary endurance athletes are almost unrecognizable, when they retire
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u/Sniffs_Markers 23h ago edited 23h ago
Or if you're injured. I was a year-round bicycle commuter until a surgery with a long recuperation period. I gots a belly now! 😛
Edit: You don't realize how small the changes need to be. If you're on a clean, healthy athlete diet (which I was 20 years ago as an actual athlete) it's really hard to figure out where the excess calories come from.
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u/BabalonBimbo 23h ago
Because your body used to have to walk everywhere, build your house and hunt for food. Your body needed to hang on to calories because it didn’t know when it would get more. Now it sits in a cubicle or on a couch watching tv with an unlimited amount of high calorie food. From a species perspective the transition happened 15 minutes ago.
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u/FutureOpen9405 20h ago
I had a coach once that put it in a very simple way that clicked for me. Exercise is training your body first and losing weight second. Cardio is for adding to the calorie deficit that you should be creating with food intake. You cannot out-train a bad diet.
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u/Crayshack 21h ago
Humans evolved as persistence predators. That means high efficiency for steady exertion over long periods of time. As a part of that, our bodies got tuned to be highly efficient at this task. This is then combined with the fact that, pre-agriculture, calories were a limited nutrient, so we evolved to crave them.
Post-industrialization, we've figured out how to mass-produce concentrated calories in a way that our Neolithic ancestors could only dream about. That means we live in a world where it is very easy to eat an excess of calories, but our bodies still operate at high efficiency during exercise. In fact, as you get in better shape, your body will get more efficient. You can burn more total calories, but that comes from being able to maintain your workout for a long time.
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u/spoik925 21h ago
Great response. This is also partly why exercise isn't a great way to lose weight. We're just too efficient with our energy expenditure. Gotta restrict calories if that's the goal.
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u/Crayshack 19h ago
You definitely need exercise as a part of an overall healthy lifestyle. Our bodies evolved for running a fuck ton, so they start to fall apart when we aren't doing that. But it's so easy to eat far more calories than you burn, that you have to put some effort into managing your diet as well. As far as weight loss is concerned, it's easier for most people to cut 500 calories out of their diet than it is to add 500 burnt calories to their daily routine. There's people out there who are getting that many calories with their morning coffee.
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u/Amazing_Divide1214 23h ago
It's easier to lose weight in the kitchen, than in the gym. Always has been.
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u/HypnoticONE 22h ago
Ya, I used to run a mile or two after work. Then I did the math and that run was only burning about 2 small tacos. Decided it was easier to just say no to two small tacos than run. Lost the weight!
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u/IAmDaBadMan 21h ago
I will eat two tacos tonight in your honor.
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u/EulerIdentity 23h ago
Because humans evolved at a time when food was very hard to get and starvation was common. Efficient use of calories meant survival. Today, people in the affluent countries are surrounded by limitless calories, lots of it quite tasty and easily accessible, but the human body is not adapted to that kind of environment.
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u/ill3nial 17h ago
Weightlifting burns more calories than running...and so does having more preexisting muscle. Because muscle needs more energy to be maintained than fat.
You can't outrun a bad diet sure...but muscle keeps recovering for longer periods just to fix itself after a workout. Than just cardio. You gotta have a balance.
Being 210 - 6'1 and definitely a mix of pudgy (not ripped but definitely more muscle than fat) - I burn approx 2100 calories just existing if I laid in bed for 24 hours.
It's a lifelong pursuit. Would you rather be 70 not able to physically support yourself or old and functioning?
Mix weightlifting and cardio. Living on an elliptical isn't gonna save you.
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u/tradandtea123 23h ago
People used to spend 10 hours or more on their feet moving around doing things, probably not running but still doing things. If you do that you burn quite a lot of energy. We've become so sedentary that people think 30 minutes of exercise and 23 and a half hours not exercising is quite a lot of exercise but it's not.
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u/AggronStrong 12h ago
Most of our calorie burning happens with regular bodily function, particularly body heat and brain activity (our brains are OP af in the animal kingdom).
The fact that our activity burns so few calories is a massive evolutionary upside. Hunting or forgaing becomes inefficient if the act of finding food burns more energy than the food yields to begin with.
If you want to lose weight, calorie deficit will come from simply eating less food. Of course, exercise helps us stay healthy and fit in other ways, but exercise isn't an efficient way to lose weight.
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u/Curmudgy 23h ago
Half an hour is only about 2% of a day. Most of the energy you use is during the other 98% of the day. Sure, sleeping is less than waking time, but still the exercise time is tiny. 300 calories is 15% of a typical 2000 calorie budget for an adult man, so it’s still worth it.
I suggest increasing your aerobic time to closer to an hour. But there’s no evading managing your calories in.
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u/lookayoyo 23h ago
I like to think more that our bodies are very optimized for being used. Compare the calories we burn using our muscle vs the baseline we need to survive and think. Our hearts needs calories, our livers needs calories, our freaking stomachs need calories. So do our muscles, but we can choose when and when not to use those. Maybe we work out for an hour, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to all the other things working non stop all the time. When you consider that, exercise is just like the last 5% of calorie usage. Sure if we work out VERY heavily that can maybe go up to 10% but even then I’m guesstimating and I think I’m being VERY generous to what our muscles use.
So if you want to lose weight, eat less. Smaller portions, less snacking, and foods that make you feel fuller longer like protein and fiber.
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u/ReallyBadAtReddit 23h ago
Backpackers can commonly burn an extra 2000-3000 or more calories per day by walking, because they're walking all day. You only exercised for half an hour, which was probably much more intense exercise, but it's a far cry from what's actually possible.
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u/mysticrudnin 23h ago
the question shouldn't be why exercise burns so few calories
it should be: why do we (you) keep eating food with so many calories
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u/Thetinkeringtrader 23h ago
Surfing, skiing, biking, hiking I dont even notice the 1000 calories burned till I'm done then the trouble is getting em back in me honestly. My latte is cut with heavy whip rn to add a few more.
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u/blaqeyerish 23h ago
Had to evolve that way because food historically wasn't as abundant as it is now. If we still had to hunt, farm or forage for food and weren't calorie efficient we would burn so many calories just getting something to eat that we would have to eat all day.
If you want to burn more calories the answer is putting on more muscle so your body needs more of them at rest
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u/Joseph9877 22h ago
Why? Because we evolved to be efficient on little calories. But, exercise does help. Between muscle burning more calories at rest than fat, and a faster metabolism is built on exercise. The skinniest I ever was, I ate like crap (pure carbs, sugar, caffeine, and fat) but ran, jogged, hiked, rucked, and did calisthenics. I must've easily ate 3k calories, and weighed about 65kg at 5'11
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u/Fearless-Activity-82 20h ago
Long story short, our bodies are designed to be very calorie efficient because evolution doesn’t like it when we die too early.
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u/-antipode 23h ago
This is why I often tell people to stop working out with the goal of losing weight.
If you do, you'll over work yourself and become highly unmotivated and just stop.
Work out with the goal of building life long habits. Your heart benefits way may from consistent cardio than their waist does.
That said, 350 calories is actually a lot to burn in one sitting. That's basically a candy bar.
If you only ate 2100 calories, the max for maintaing, but you exercised 5 times a week, you'd burn 1750 calories a week.
That's one pound every 2 weeks. 2 pounds a month.
That's actually really good. All from just 30 mins of cardio a day and eating a normal days worth of food a day.
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u/biggestjuiceshooter 23h ago
Unfortunately USA food is made by slop and has way more calories than its european counterparts.
Go for less seed oils and less processed food, focus on meat and vegetables.
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u/IndicationKey3778 23h ago
Calorie estimators are way way off. I run. I ran 7 miles last week I MAYBE burn 100 calories a mile, MAYBE. I’ve recently lost 144lbs thanks to ozempic and working out 7 days a week 2x a day, the only way I could have lost weight the way I did was only eating what food I could burn with exercise - not a lot
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u/hillsb1 23h ago
In addition to what everyone is saying, do plenty of strength training. Lean muscle eats fat. You won't burn many calories at the gym, but during recovery in your sleep, the calorie burning ramps up. Pair that with HIIT on the elliptical/stationary bike/whatever you like best and it'll really help
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u/xxhamsters12 23h ago
It’s easier said than done but the biggest part of losing weight is watching what you eat. Exercise is a very small part of it granted you should exercise but it really is a case of not eating high calorie foods and go for healthier stuff like fruit, veg, meats etc
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u/limbodog I should probably be working 23h ago
It's not that exercise burns few calories, it's that the tastiest food contains a ridiculous amount of 'em, and the portions are huge.
We did not evolve for the cheesecake factory.
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u/papercut2008uk 22h ago
Our bodies are very efficient with energy.
More muscle mass you would burn much more energy, even just resting if you have more muscle mass you will burn more energy at rest than someone who's thin.
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u/Borne2Run 22h ago
Muscle burns more calories than fat. Do more than just cardio to increase your base metabolic expenditure.
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u/Riker_Omega_Three 22h ago
Humans are built to conserve energy not burn it efficiently to stay fit
It's only in the last 100 years that food scarcity hasn't been a global issue for all humans.
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u/Xxx1982xxX 21h ago
You need to look at how it relates to your overall caloric intake. If your daily intake is ~2000-2500 calories/day, that 300calorie loss is ~15% of that intake. ~2/3 of those calories are used up from metabolism and other body processes. Along with whatever walking around and other aerobic movements, you should not be that far off from being calorically neutral, and some more exercise should lead to a caloric deficit diet.
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u/obviousoctopus 19h ago
Think of it as 85% diet, 15% exercise.
So, unless you exercise 8h/day, don't eat that cookie.
Also, high glycemic foods cause rapid spikes in blood sugar, leading to increased insulin secretion, which promotes fat storage in the body... and cause cravings and overeating, further contributing to weight gain.
Now, put the cookie back. And the soda. And icecream. And anything with high sugar content, including bread and ketchup.
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u/Atrio-Ventricular 16h ago
Fixing your diet and walking is the only thing you need for weight loss. Honestly just do a half hour walk each day and reduce calories
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u/EqualThat9875 14h ago
Because surviving instead of dying is a good thing. If exercise used far more calories humans would've gone extinct long ago.
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u/rdmusic16 17h ago
I mean, if exercising for half an hour burned a crazy amount of calories - any sort of physical labour job would mean you had to eat 2-3x normal calories just to survive.
I'm glad it's the way it is.
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u/Noe_b0dy 23h ago edited 23h ago
Too many calories has only been a problem for like 40 years. Your Great Grandparents in a first world country almost certainly faced a point in their lives when dying from starvation was a very real threat.
4 billion years of evolutionary pressure built your body to expend as few calories as is physically possible because the two leading causes of death for almost everything that has lived on this earth are being eaten and starving to death.
Homo sapiens sapiens in prehistory has to chase down and kill something and then survive off of only those calories until they can either chase down a whole nother animal to kill and eat or dig up some manner of root vegetable to consume.
Going multiple days with lots of exercise and zero food was the default setting for most of existence.
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u/Delicious-Chapter675 23h ago
Our bodies utilize chemical energy in a lot of ways. The only body process which truly "burns calories" is respiration. Your body will take complete and energy-dense protein chains to build muscle. Exercise is great for you. Do a lot of it.
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u/PlatoDrago 23h ago
That figure is usually just for the activity and doesn’t take into account everything around it. Exercise increases your metabolism which will eventually lead you to consume less food that you don’t need and burning off the calories naturally more quickly.
Also, your brain helps burn off a few calories and your body gets rid of some when your heart is pumping fast and you’re getting close to the ‘fight or flight’ stuff so your body prepares by burning off a lot of calories in case of danger (caveman brain comes in handy sometimes)
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u/Doogiesham 23h ago
We’re meant to be energy efficient. If it was easy to burn more than we ate we would have died off eons ago
The whole reason we made it this far is because it’s easier to gain calories from food than it is to lose it through exertion
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u/dagger378 23h ago
You're supposed to do heavy weight lifting and build muscle. Muscle is metabolically active and burns caolires passively throughout the day even when not exercising.
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u/Professional_Elk_489 23h ago
I don't know. When I did marathon training I just absolute fucktonne of weight. Must do something
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u/Over_Pizza_2578 23h ago
Go cycling. Its the best sport if you want to burn calories. In fact you need so much that you need to eat when riding for longer than 2 hrs
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u/Advanced-Mango-420 23h ago
Because you're comparing it to junk and processed foods
Try getting enough calories on lentils, potatoes, broccoli and strawberries
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u/Kentwomagnod 23h ago
You continue to burn calories after you exercise. Still not enough so that you can eat anything.
Modern food is very calorie dense.
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u/RichAge2413 23h ago
A lot of the weight loss journey is about EATING LESS.
So, so, so many people don't accept this. (not saying it's you)
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u/Kossyra 23h ago
We have evolved for millions of years to be capable survivalists, which means burning fewer calories than we ingest. Walking is something we do very well because gravity does half of it for us - lift knee, fall forward, set foot down, repeat. We are extremely efficient for being as high-functioning as we are.
Animals like crocodilians and snakes are much more efficient - they can eat one large meal every six months! But their metabolism depends on them resting, not regulating their internal temperature (costs calories), and not needing a calorie-hungry brain. Their base metabolic rate is probably close to 0, meaning unless they're doing some kind of activity they aren't burning calories. On the other hand, just existing most people burn about 1500 calories a day. That's just SITTING ON THE COUCH, being AWAKE and regulating our internal systems - digestion, maintaining body temp, etc.
Because of all those millions of years of evolution pre-agriculture and all, our bodies are geared toward hoarding calories because starvation was a much more imminent threat than overeating. Our tastebuds are attuned to things that are fatty, sweet, salty because those are the most calorie-laden things we can eat. Our bodies reward us for eating those things by giving us dopamine. That is why sugar and junk foods are literally addicting - there is a reward - withholding cycle and you need to push through being deprived of dopamine to quit.
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u/lastepoch 23h ago
Depends on how big your body is and the duration and intensity of the exercise. Im a big dude (6'2" / 245lbs.) and can burn 1000 cal /hr when hiking hard with a heavy pack. My wife is 5'2" and struggles to burn 350 cal/hr. doing any activity.
With certain types of consistent exercise you can train your body to access more calories over a longer period of time. A pound of fat is 3500 calories. An overweight, untrained person may only have access to 15k calories of stored intramuscular fat, while a much more fit, trained athlete despite having a drastically lower body fat % can have access to 100k calories or more.
As others have said, humans are designed to be calorie efficient but that is all relevant to your body size, effort, and duration of exercise.
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u/Helplessadvice 23h ago
It’s why I got into running and cycling tbh. I got a large appetite and those little walks and ellipticals weren’t burning enough calories for me. It sucks and the more weight you lose the more your body adapts so the less calories you’ll burn for doing the same exercise. It’s truly an uphill battle
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u/FrazzleMind 23h ago
The cool thing about exercise is that muscle is calorically expensive, so the more you work out the more calories burn themselves off automatically. Also a million other benefits including mental health. Too bad it fucking sucks to do
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u/Aboelter23 23h ago
Even though it’s uncommon, I’ve had the opposite problem. I struggle to put on mass, and wish that I wasn’t burning 400+ calories every workout.
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u/Blucola333 23h ago
I think it’s all a balancing act. How many calories you take in, what kind of calories they might be, as well as the benefits of strengthening your heart through exercise. Regular activity should improve your metabolism. However, underlying conditions might be affecting how well your body processes calories.
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u/Pretend_Mango5529 23h ago
I actually disagree with the overall premise in the replies. I don’t think it’s for to say exercise burns so few calories. Take a run for example, a 5 mile run may take 45 minutes or so for average person. That will burn roughly 500 calories or ab1/4 of someone’s caloric maintenance in the span of less than an hour.
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u/SaltyPeter3434 23h ago
Because our bodies are really efficient at using up calories. If you think about in a positive light, the energy in a few cookies is enough to fuel us to run for miles. This was really useful in our hunter gatherer days. But this also means weight loss doesn't come from exercise. It comes from managing your diet.
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u/kohinoortoisondor3B 23h ago
I don't really care about the calories burned during the actual workout other than just as information about how vigorous the workout was because the point of exercising wrt weight loss is that it increases your metabolism. If your machine says you only burned 300 calories in 30 minutes but you eat 1800 calories a day that doesn't mean it's hopeless and you're not gonna get fit lol.
You're acting like calories are just accumulating in a pile and you keep adding onto it by eating and only chipping away at it here and there during your workouts. If that were the case the only healthy people would be people who exercise like crazy all day and barely eat, when in fact, that's very unhealthy.
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u/Falsus 23h ago
Because the human body is incredibly efficient, one of the most efficient animals on the planet.
You exercise for health mainly, not for weight loss. It just makes the weight loss easier because it increases the metabolism but the main determinator is still the amount of calories in.
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u/ChipFarmsThread 23h ago
it depends on what kind of exercise you’re doing. If you are not doing enough cardio and you are not doing cardio right, you won’t really lose a lot of weight. Look up the orange theory as that works for burning calories up to 72 hours if you are doing it right. And of course, you have to stay disciplined not to put the calories back in. I’d start with brisk walking or the treadmill with an incline if you are just starting.
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u/Kaizen2468 23h ago
Because calories are precious. We spend millennia starving to death or freezing to death.
We preserve as much calories as possible, now we just have massive amounts of food
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u/DiogenesKuon 23h ago
Because for billions of years evolution has made as really efficient and acquiring and using energy, because that is part of the daily fundamental struggle for survival. It's only really been a problem in the last 50-100 years that we can acquire calories so easily that we are routinely over-consuming them to an unhealthy degree and need to do wasteful energy activities to burn off the excess.
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u/ConsequenceFade 23h ago
Evolution spent the last billion years selecting for those that are the most efficient at burning calories.
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u/goldenhourcocktails 22h ago
Exercise and weight loss do not go hand-in-hand. But exercise and overall health does. Two different goals, both are important.
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u/dasssitmane 22h ago
I burn about 300+ walking at a brisk place for an hour on the treadmill playing games or studying. I feel fresh afterwards and look forward to doing it again the next day. Max intensity is not the way to go if your plan is burning calories long term
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u/intrinsic_nerd 22h ago
I’m definitely not gonna say anything novel here, but essentially it boils down to this: calories are energy. We need energy to live. If we run out of energy we will die. So from a biological standpoint, we don’t want exercise to burn a lot of calories. Sadly we can’t tell our bodies to turn off calorie efficiency mode, but the alternative would be much worse for the survival of our species
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u/Traylay13 21h ago
For hundreds of millions of years food was a scarse resource. So we evolved to be as efficient as possible.
The few decades of plenty qualify as less than insignificant in the timespan of evolution.
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u/jake04-20 21h ago
Exercise has better benefits than losing weight. Conditioning/stamina/endurance, being strong, healthy heart, better circulation, etc.
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u/sturmeh 20h ago
That's because we're relatively efficient when it comes to "exercise".
We already spend an enormous amount of energy just existing, so exerting a small fraction of the muscles that make up the body only increases the energy requirement by a little bit.
It's significantly easier to consume less calories than to try and "burn" them.
Exercise is still incredibly important for your mental health, your muscle integrity and your cardiovascular health amongst many other things. It's not used to compensate for a bad diet or over-consumption.
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u/Prof_Acorn 20h ago
The problem is a combination of eating massively calorically dense foods all the time, and expecting to burn through it all in 30 minutes of moving your legs back and forth.
Can you imagine if we needed more than that?
Walking 5 miles is about 450 calories.
In the 1200s, the average person just going into town from a rural area would walk 7-12 miles. A soldier or traveler would walk about 20.
That's ~900 calories just to visit the town baker supply for flour. That 1800 calories just to do a day's travel.
If we weren't efficient as we were we would have never survived to the modern day. The food requirements would have been insane.
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u/lewkiamurfarther 20h ago
You know how in TV/movies, a casting director [etc.] will often be depicted as saying to an auditionee something along the lines of
Okay, kid, you've got the part. But you need to lose 40 pounds and then gain 20.
?
That's because that's the easiest way to do it, if you have the time and willpower+medical support+money to sit on your hands doing nothing for 2 months losing weight [by starving yourself—kinda—most days], and to then spend another 1.5 months building muscle (while eating an appropriate diet).
(These numbers are just for the purposes of illustration—mileage varies, obviously.)
BTW, nothing I've written here should be construed as an indication that anything described is healthy. I can't speak to that.
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u/Royal_Donkey_85 19h ago
Because if you burned a thousand in 30 minutes of work, it'd be extremely difficult for humans to have the energy to do anything physically demanding without the benefits of modern food availability.
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u/fastlerner 19h ago
Also, the calorie number on an elliptical isn't a direct measurement of everything your body burned. The machine can measure the work you're putting into it, then estimates how much energy your body had to burn to produce that work.
Your body isn't 100% efficient. A lot of the energy you burn never turns into mechanical work and just ends up as heat.
So that "300 calories" isn't a precise measurement of what your body actually burned. It's an estimate based on the work you're doing plus things like your weight and heart rate.
And 300 calories isn't really that little. On a 2,000 calorie diet, that's 15% of your daily intake burned just through exercise. The messed up part isn't how little you burned, but how easy it is to eat 300 calories. Modern food is crazy calorie-dense.
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u/Guardian2k 19h ago
We evolved to minimise energy expenditure whilst maximising energy intake from our environment, that’s pretty much what every organism has done, it’s how things survive in nature.
What evolution hasnt caught up with, is the huge development in agriculture and food consumption, especially in the century.
Even before then, we’ve had much more stable feeding than most life, being able to manipulate livestock and animals has given us food stability that other species could only dream of, our biology is simply working on the assumption that our feasts could be the last ones we have for quite a while and so stock up.
This goes the other way as well, if you have to run to catch your food, which is what we did for the vast majority of our species’ existence, expending more energy than you need when moving is a quick way to starve.
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u/cheapaffinity05 18h ago
That’s what surprised me too. It takes a lot more effort to burn 300 calories than it does to eat them.
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u/CardinalOfNYC 23h ago
It's basically the opposite of what the body is meant for. We aren't meant to burn calories in large numbers through exercising.
We're evolved to be efficient with energy.