Photo: Nestor Rizhniak (Shutterstock)
Exercise offers a number of benefits, including helping to prevent or reduce the effects of chronic health conditions such as anxiety, depression, heart disease, and high blood pressure. It is an integral part of good health in many ways.
However, as scientists have found over the past few years, what we do doesn’t result in long-term, significant increases in the number of calories we burn in a day.
“Your lifestyle doesn’t significantly affect how many calories you burn, at least not in a simple one-on-one way,” said, ” Hermann Pontzer, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University and author of the book Burn: New research blows the lid off how we can really burn calories, lose weight, and stay healthy.
Instead, our bodies are adapted to burn a relatively fixed amount of energy each day – an amount that doesn’t vary significantly between those of the same weight who are sedentary and those who are active.
Daily calorie consumption does not vary much
When you start a new exercise program, you are likely to burn extra calories in the short term, but within a few months your body will adjust so your total energy expenditure remains within a relatively tight range.
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“The body adapts to these long-term changes in the way you use calories,” said Samuel Urlacher, an evolutionary anthropologist at Baylor University who works with Pontzer. “If you exercise regularly, you are not consuming as many calories as these predictive equations say.”
This concept, called limited daily energy consumption, is relatively new to fitness and nutrition, and was compared by comparing the energy needs of people who live traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyles with high levels of physical activity to the energy needs of people with a sedentary lifestyle.
The average calorie consumption is the same for sedentary and active people
Pontzer, Urlacher, and others have found that both groups of the population – active hunters and gatherers and sedentary people – burn on average the same number of calories per day once they have adjusted to their weight. The difference seems to be in how they burn calories rather than how many.
Although the original idea was that the similarities were due to active people either being less active the rest of the day or being incredibly efficient with their movements, the answer seems a little more complicated.
It turns out that the body spends a lot of energy doing critically important tasks that aren’t quite as visible or as obvious as our activity level. “Even if you exercise all the time, you are still spending well over 50% of your calories just to rest,” said Pontzer.
This includes the energy expenditure for your immune system, your stress response, your reproductive response and your brain. “Your brain burns the equivalent of 300 kilocalories every day,” said Pontzer. “That corresponds to a 5K run.”
Our body uses the energy that is not used for training for other tasks
The thought is that when the body is faced with an excess of energy, which has been a relatively rare situation for most of human history, it uses it for processes that are useful but usually low priority for the body. “Now that we live in a high-energy environment all the time, your body can do these low priority things all the time,” said Pontzer.
A helpful analogy would be to think of this concept as similar to a household budget. If you’ve always made just enough to survive just to make some extra cash, you will likely be spending it on something that will really help you but will go well beyond your normal budget. You will not change your overall budget as you cannot expect to receive that extra money again.
With our bodies adapted to survive on very tight and often unpredictable energy levels, the extra energy that a sedentary lifestyle provides is treated like a one-off surplus to either use up or lose.
Lack of exercise leads to increased inflammation and stress reactions
This means that if your body doesn’t burn those calories while exercising, it will use those calories for low priority things that are useful but have high energy costs, such as: B. the inflammation and stress response.
In small amounts, the inflammatory and stress reactions protect us from pathogens and help us to escape danger. At the chronic level, this can damage blood vessels and other tissues, leading to a range of health problems.
Heavily sedentary people show higher levels of chronic inflammation as well as an increased stress response, including increased levels of cortisol and adrenaline. People who are very active have lower levels of inflammation and a reduced response to stress. Active people who do not eat enough take longer to recover from injury or infection because their bodies cannot use enough energy for the immune system.
When it comes to how our bodies use energy, we are still stuck in an evolutionary past where energy was always scarce and we needed any inflammatory or stress responses we could afford.
The difference is that we are now living in an energetic environment where we can afford so much that it is harmful to our bodies. “We call this an evolutionary mismatch,” said Urlacher. “Because the changes were so abrupt, our biology is not optimized for our new environments.”
Choose workouts based on what you enjoy, not calories
In a way, this knowledge is liberating: we know that exercise can help our health and happiness in a very important, tangible way that goes well beyond just burning calories. Exercise improves your mood, helps prevent or alleviate chronic health conditions, and it is a great joy to have the strength and energy to lead the life you want.
With the goal of getting extra calories out of the way, your priorities can only be figuring out what types of exercise you enjoy the most – the types of movements that you enjoy doing, that make you happy, and that you want to do regularly , Damn it count calories.
So stop counting your exercise calories and instead focus on finding activities that work for you so you can access the many other benefits that come with regular physical activity.
And what should you eat and in what amounts? That should be a relatively constant amount with a focus on healthy foods.
“You can’t escape a bad diet,” said Urlacher.
