You Don't Need to Exercise to Burn Off Fast Food

need to exercise to burn off fast food treats or desserts? Now, this is an excellent question. You don't need to exercise to burn off the calories you eat. And it's such a freeing thing to know, and it came from me. You can trust me. You don't need to do that. Those who claim that you need to burn off certain items of food or certain items of food equate to this amount of calories. And like if you eat a timtam you have to run for forty minutes, they are

not they are not promoting healthy eating. Okay, it's a disordered eating and they're forgetting basic physiology. So one, you need calories to stay alive, and two you constantly burn calories without exercising, which is great. So most of the calories you burn each day occur without exercise, and seventy percent, it's seventy percent of them are just burnt at rest,

that's your basal metabolic rate. Fifteen percent of them are burnt off from just fidgeting, light movements, breathing, blinking, all those things, ten percent from digestion, and a pathetic five percent via structured planned exercise. So depressing just five percent from your session this morning in the gym or the run or whatever you did this morning. Right, But the good news is right now listening to this, if you're sitting down, you're burning. You know, you're working towards that

seventy percent the basal metabolic rate. It's really great. And the psychological relationship between eating and exercising should never be codependent, all right, It's very dangerous. It can destroy a healthy relationship with food and exercise. You should never have this idea of earning your calories from exercise or punishing yourself after eating. It's just illogical and it's very very dangerous. We need calories to stay alive, and if there's no exercise,

we still need that energy. So exercise should be a means of joy, satisfaction, accomplishment, recompositioning the body, but never punishment or your sole tool for weight loss, because you know, weight loss is really I reckon ninety percent what you eat, okay, and eating should be all about nourishing and fulfilling the soul and never about guilt and deprivation. So let's go into the energy you're a little bit more depth. So the human body burns calories throughout the day in various

processes and activities. Okay, we all know that. And the calorie expenditure can be categorized into several key parts, and each of these parts contribute to the TDE your total daily energy expenditure your TVEE. Okay, so let's break down how that is. We actually get to the TCEE. So number one, we start with the BMR your basal metabolic rate, which is the amount of energy your body needs to

function at rest to mattain vital body functions. You're breathing, your circulation, your cell production, digestion, temperature regulation, all of those things, and it accounts for the largest portion of your daily calorie expenditure. So sixty to seventy five percent totally calories burned in a day. It's crazy. And you know things in bluencing your BMR are your age, your sex,

your muscle mass, hormone balance. So you know, more lean muscle mass you have, the higher BMR you have, the more metabolically active you are, and the better it is. So that's why I'm always banging on about the strength training because we want that lean muscle mass to increase the BMR so that throughout the day we're burning not just sixty percent of calories, but we might be burning seventy five percent, which is really really good. Then you've

got the TF the thermic effect of food. That refers to the energy it takes to digest food, absorb food, metabolize food, and it's about ten percent of your total energy expenditure. Protein has a high thermic effect compared to fats and carbohydrates, meaning protein takes more calories to break it down and digest it than other macronutrients, which is great. So if you eat lots of protein, it keeps you full,

it suppresses appetite. It has a high thermic effect, which means it's burning itself off as you're eating it, and you're building that muscle tissue as well, which is going to increase your BMR. So protein is just the bee's knees and the ants pants. I love it. Then you've got physical activity, so exercise activity thermogenesis EAT. This includes calories burned through your workout, you sport, your exercise, and

then you've got your neat. Okay, your non exercise activity thermogenesis, which includes energy where you're just sleeping, eating, typing, you're gardening, I don't know, you're fidgeting, you're doing a podcast. All right, So they've got your eating, your neat, and that's about fifteen to thirty percent of your total daily energy expenditure. Then you've got impacts of lifestyle. Some people have more physically demanding jobs. Like I'm looking out the window there

are people across the road building a house. I'm thinking, well, that's a hard day's work. They're putting up the frame, they're carrying wood, like it's incredible opposed to me sitting here doing this podcast right now. So you know, there's different elements that go into the eat and the neat. But after intense exercise is also the energy cost of recovery.

So the body continues to burn more calories than normal at its resting state after you've done the exercise, so you've got the post exercise oxygen consumption, the epoch effect. This is the after burn effect where you are burning calories at rest after you've done the exercise and you're

just doing nothing. And this is the best payoff I think for doing exercise, and the epoch payoff to the total daily energy expenditure is relatively small, but it enhances your overall metabolic rate following high intensity or prolonged physical activities, So you are increasing your BMR, which is really really really important. So the duration and the intensity of exercise can influence that post exercise oxygen consumption, the epoch the after burn effect, So the more vigorous and the longer

duration you go, the more epoch you'll get. So it's a really really good thing. So there's a lot of information there, right, How do you break it down? How do you make sense of it? Well, basically, engaging in strength training to increase your BMR is really important. So increasing your muscle mass that's going to increase the amount of calories that you burn every day. Incorporating protein can increase the thermic effect of food. So they've got the

TEF covered there. Then you maximize your neat just your accidental activity throughout the day, whether you're increasing the amount of steps you do on a fitbit or your Apple Watch, whatever, that can really increase your overall daily energy expenditure. And then if you're really leveraging that after burn effect by doing more high intensity workout, you can increase your BMR

and get more out of your exercise session all over. So, really by balancing your energy intake, calories in, calories out, and understanding that there are all these processes in play that are burning calories right the day, and that your exercise is only five to ten percent of all of those processes, you don't need to earn the tymtam. You don't need to earn a treat. You don't need to work off the fast food. I'm all about in moderation though.

If you're having fast food every meal, if you're having a packet of Timtams every day, obviously it's going to catch up with you. You can't outtrain a bad diet. But if they're treats, if they're now every sometimes foods, if they're you know, desserts, you know it's going to not make a difference, and we have to really understand how calories are burnt. And in a side note, I

think this stuff should be taught at school. I get really angry that we know there are sixty minutes in an hour, but we don't know that there's four calories in a grammar protein, or four calories in a grammar cover hydrate and nine calories in a grammar fat. Then you know that thirty grams of protein is going to be one hundred and twenty calories, and you can sort of work off that. It's just such basic information. I

just think it should be taught in school. It's just some basic nutritional information so that you can go about your day understanding that the body is working, you know, all the time, that you don't have to burn off food. I just think they would create more healthy relationships with food, more healthy relationships with exercise if we knew some of these real basics, like sixty minutes in an hour, four calories in the grammar protein. It it would just make

life so much easier. Thanks so much for listening to Bounce Forward. Hey, I love having your company, so please DM me on Instagram at tiphol Underscore Exo and let me know what topics or questions you'd love me to cover. Get to rate and review me on your podcast out Speak soon. Happy days,