Many People look to exercise as the magic ingredient to solving all their body shape goals. While this is great it is missing out on the other two sides of the triangle which is the food you eat and the amount of movement you do in general life. This is important because what you do for most of the day dictates your overall energy expenditure. I have spoken many times about how using steps is normally good enough for measuring this element. The steps imply the usage of energy for that day.
However, there is more to it than that. Differences exist between whether you sit down vs lie down. Researchers have also found that sitting in a cooler room burns more energy. While variety exists in the data for calories burnt per hour in different situations, the table below gives a nice guide. Calorie burn is affected by body size which can be an more or less than 10-20% of the figures shown here for this body weight.
What Does It Mean?
It shows that you can significantly increase energy expenditure through changing what you do with your body all day. This day and age standing at your office desk is becoming much more common and in fat loss terms this has great benefits –
-You burn 50% more calories standing compared to sitting.
The stats show that lying down watching TV uses almost the same amount of energy as sleeping. As mentioned steps usually will be good enough to account for measuring your energy and movement, when it comes to walking –
You burn 3 times more calories walking compared to Sleeping / lying down.
You burn 2.5 times more calories walking compared to sitting down.
You burn 50% more calories walking than standing.
How Do You Spend Your Time?
Take a moment to see how much time out of the 24 hours in any given day do you spend sitting down or lying down? From this point begin to ask yourself how can you increase time spent standing or walking?? This will have a huge impact on your daily energy expenditure.
Exercise vs Duration
I am someone who has spent so long promoting exercise to anyone who will listen. When it comes to weight loss I spend a lot of time underselling exercise. This is because in energy terms people way overestimate the benefits of getting out of breath. While great health increases occur as a result there is no magical influence on body fat. The table above shows general energy expenditure when running which is over twice the energy burn per hour than walking. This is great news but calm down…. how long can you run for each day before your body falls apart?? Maybe 20, 30, 45 mins max. When you line up walking alongside it then simply walking twice the time that you run is about the same fat loss benefit (if all else is kept the same). Yet how long could you walk in a day? I have averaged 7-8 hours a day walking for weeks upon weeks.
Conclusion
Stop sitting and lying down all day and get moving. One study estimated that if we replaced sitting with a treadmill desk you could lose 20 KG a year…. While most cant do that in their office the underlying message is something to take on board.
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