Does a sedentary lifestyle burn the same amount of calories as an active lifestyle?

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.

2021 NYT Article:

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.

I don’t follow this topic closely, but from time to time in recent years … I’ll run across an article that says something like “What we now know about dieting: Exercise really doesn’t matter. You want to lose weight? Just stop eating.

Now, such articles are usually oversimplified glurge. However, even in sober apparently well-researched articles (can find cites on request) … it seems there’s a building (or built?) consensus that specifically for weight loss, diet matters several orders of magnitude more than exercise. Apparently, getting lost in the Andes for a year will lose an obese person much more weight than spending that same year training to walk a 10K.

Exercise tends to raise your metabolic level even for a while after you are done with the exercise, or so I have been told by health educators. It may not be a large percentage higher than resting calorie burning, but it adds up, and I think it is probably the chief benefit of exercise as it affects fat burning specifically (if you don’t eat more than when resting).

It makes sense that your body adjusts somewhat to your daily activity level. Vigorous exercise is often started as the necessity for raising your metabolic activity, and exercise for pulmonary health seems to be cited with specifics more often than for weight loss. The focus on calories related to weight loss is somewhat off center also. You have to burn more calories than you consume to lose weight, but changing the rate of metabolizing calories is not as simple as increased unqualified and unquantified exercise.

From what I understand is that for most non-athletes – and especially for people starting from obesity – changing the rate of metabolizing calories is too difficult and unrealistic of a goal to be entered into in the immediate term of a weight-loss program. IOW, an obese person can’t go from “no exercise” to what would count as “vigorous regular exercise” – the obese person’s fitness baseline is too far away. Sharply cutting calories seems to be the only effective tool in the weight-loss tool box at least in the beginning. But again … more gathered impressions than something I can cite right now.

AIUI, the purpose of exercise isn’t to burn calories, but to hone your muscles, benefit your heart, arteries, etc. The amount of extra calories burned is few or nil, as the OP pointed out. But exercise still has myriad other benefits that make it worth it.

There are very wide definitions for “active” lifestyle. Training to WALK a 10K may be more active than sitting on the couch, but compared to someone training to RUN a marathon, sitting on the couch and walking around a bit every day are functionally indistinguishable.

As far as exercise vs diet, I think it’s been pretty established that you exercise for fitness and health, and diet to lose weight. Health and weight not necessarily being proportional to each other. Plenty of “overweight” people are perfectly healthy and fit, and vice versa.

Stronger By Science did a podcast on this. It goes fairly deep into the research on energy compensation.

In short (from memory), the body adjusts over time to long periods of exercise, to the point that the difference in calorie burn becomes negligible. If it weren’t the case, there are people who would be burning thousands of calories a day, which is not biologically sustainable. So the human organism has to compensate by tamping waaaay down on energy expenditure.

I’m not sure how this would apply to a moderately active person, or at what point in time that effect would kick in. But my understanding is that’s one of the reasons weight loss tends to plateau. You’re not getting the same number of calories burned during your workouts as you did before, even at the same intensity.

You know, I’ve been wondering: I’ve felt really cold this winter, even when heat is turned on. In this past year, I did a lot more biking and running than before, too.

I’m wondering if this means my body is compensating for my exercise by deliberately turning down my body’s internal heating to save calories, so now I’m cold all the time?

This. When I was in my late teens and early 20s, I went on a few backpacking trips that lasted 1-2 weeks, with each day covering as much as ten miles through very mountainous terrain. My recollection was that we just weren’t able to eat enough food to keep from losing weight.

I’m in my 50s now and driving a desk, and I don’t seem to have that same problem anymore.

So what do they mean by “might expect to burn”? They don’t mean the literal amount of work done, if we apply a 1 newton force on an object for 100 meters, we used at least 100 joules, not 72 or we’ve broken the laws of physics.

I assume there is some generally accepted approximation for the efficiency of the human body (i.e. how many calories are wasted in heat, etc. for every calorie of useful work we do). And using that approximation would mean we would use 100 calories doing a certain amount of work (whatever that number is its far less than 1.0, so we are doing far less than 100 calories of actual work). In this case they’ve discovered that efficiency number to be about 28% too low, as they measured only 72 calories used not 100. That doesn’t seem particularly radical, given its only a very rough approximation, I assume?

Sledging rations can be 7000+ calories per day, and yet I have not heard of people acclimatizing to that as much as about people starving to death in the Antarctic. I doubt one would make it too long under sedentary rations.

I don’t think energy compensation can prevent you from starving, but it can probably slow down the process. But when you look at the indigenous studies where people are burning the same number of calories as a sedentary person, these are people for whom constant all-day exercise is a way of life, not an occasional excursion. Yet - my understanding from the podcast is that subjects reported being in a constant state of hunger. They are hungry their entire lives.

The article is a little confusing, but I read it as: You go to the gym and burn 100 calories, but at other times of the day you move around less than you would have if you hadn’t gone to the gym, so your net calorie burn was 72 calories.

Not listening to the podcast but my understanding is that it is most true for moderate exercise.

There are two main compensatory mechanisms.

Probably the biggest is changes in what gets labeled non exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT), movement during the rest of the day, including just fidgeting. Of course NEAT. An increase with more strength and endurance over time …

All about NEAT:

And resting metabolism changes.

Spice_Weasel - Thanks for your post(s), it’s on point. And I now have the correct terminology to search for - energy compensation. Was not aware of that. Searching on that though now seems to only bring up the actual studies which I’m not great at understanding, so I’ll give that podcast a listen and keep looking around.

re: the 100 calorie study quoted in NYT. I’m reading that as you absolutely burn 100 calories by engaging in physical activity/exercise. However, your metabolic burn (your internal activity that pumps your blood, expands your lungs, keeps your immune system on, etc, etc) will decrease - it will require or just use less energy to run your body. This confirms my point, but it’s not 1:1 like a see-saw (100 calories burned in exercise decreases metabolic burn by 100 calories), the NYT cited study says it’s a decrease of 28% (100 calories exercise decreases metabolic burn by 28 calories). For as long as I can remember, I always assumed it was just: Metabolic Burn + Physical Activity Burn - Caloric Intake (food eaten) = Net Gain/Loss of calories. That’s apparently not true, but it’s unclear just how much effect it can have.

(I’m also seeing other explanations offered as I type this - “NEAT” - which is appreciated).

One thing about weight and the human body, is how we can get used to carrying around extra cargo. Let’s say someone is 50 or 100 pounds on the high side. Go find something, anything, that weighs 50 or 100 pounds, or whatever represents the fat that you lost. Carry it around for a while, particularly up and down steps. It is truly amazing.

It is a workout to move that much extra cargo around, and when significant fat loss over time occurs, the need for so many calories declines along with that as well. I’m sure that is associated with weight loss “plateaus” and the different metabolic changes going on for adjustment.

Sedentary people can definitely lose weight, but it is more difficult because basal metabolic needs are pretty low living indoors. In order to achieve rapid weight loss something like 600 to 800 calories would be in range, maybe 900 to 1000 would be more easily sustainable over time at a more moderate rate. That is not very much food for big eaters.

Which brings up something I’ve often wondered - if someone is carrying a lot of weight around all the time, do they have some kind of strength or other physical advantage over a thin sedentary person? Would they tend to have more muscle mass as well as fat?

Yes. And they tend to lose it along with during weight loss.

If true, it would have the opposite effect from what you describe. Turning down your body’s internal heating would make you feel hot.

“Thousands of Calories a day” is normal. But levels far above that are sustainable. Look up Michael Phelps’ diet, sometime.