The question is the title, but basically, is a sedentary lifestyle burning roughly the same amount of calories per day as an active lifestyle?
I’ve just read that it doesn’t matter, both burn roughly the same amount of calories per day. Or said differently, exercise does not burn more calories than being sedentary, on average per day. Just came across this “fact” today and I’m not sure what to make of it. To be clear, this is strictly about calories in/calories out, not whether exercise/active lifestyle is healthier than a sedentary one (which it is).
[From here and below is additional context, I’m really just trying to answer the above]. I did not google much, but did find this NYT article that somewhat confirms the idea, but to a lesser degree - see below. Basically, exercising obviously burns calories, but in response your bodies metabolic burn of calories lessens. Being sedentary, does not burn calories beyond the metabolic burn, but this is not lessened if you are not active. Thus, everything averages out to about X calories per day - whether you’re active or sedentary. The implication then is caloric intake (eating more or less calories) would be the driving force to excess or lesser calories.
For every 100 calories we might expect to burn as a result of working out, most of us will actually net fewer than 72 calories burned, according to an eye-opening new study of how physical activity affects our metabolisms.
Until recently, most people, including exercise scientists, assumed that this process would be additive — that is, stroll a single mile, burn 100 calories. Stroll two, burn 200, and so on, in logical, mathematical fashion. If we do not then replace those calories with extra food, we should wind up burning more calories than we consume that day and start dropping pounds.
But that rational outcome rarely happens. In study after study, most people who begin a new exercise program lose less weight than would be expected based on the number of calories they burn during their workouts, even if they strictly monitor their diets.
So, some scientists began speculating that energy expenditure might be less elastic than we had thought. In other words, it might have limits. That possibility gained traction in 2012, with the publication of an influential study of African hunter-gatherers. It showed that, although the tribespeople regularly walked or jogged for hours, they burned about the same number of total daily calories as relatively sedentary Western men and women. Somehow, the study’s authors realized, the active tribespeople’s bodies were compensating, dialing back overall calorie burning, so that they avoided starvation as they stalked their food.
I mean, the very first sentence says you’ll burn more calories on average with exercise, just not as much as you burned doing the exercise (which is still news to me). What I read that alerted me to this, was that it would all roughly be the same, which is what the bolded part implies in the NYT article and what I’m interested in answering.