Sedentary Hibernation
Do you know why your body wants to sit down whenever it has a chance?
Because your brain knows that, by sitting, it will save energy, which is a valuable resource you must preserve when you live in nature. Yes, your body is that smart. And most of us are smart enough to understand that if the body preserves unused calories, it must store them somewhere.
What's a Calorie?
A calorie is a unit of energy. To be scientific about it, a calorie “is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius.” So, how does that relate to the food we eat?
As we eat, our food – or, rather, some of it – gets converted to the energy used by our bodies to perform various actions. We will not get into the mechanics of the process of food-to-energy transformation. We will just say that scientists have figured out a way to estimate how much energy is contributed by each macronutrient in our food, such as carbohydrates or fat. As it turns out, our food is pretty calorie-dense, and a single apple can pack as many as 100,000 calories – or 100 kilocalories (kilo = thousand). To make things a bit less intimidating, they decided to get rid of the prefix “kilo.” To avoid confusion, they replaced the unit name “calorie” with “Calorie” (with a capital C), a.k.a. “big Calorie,” “food calorie,” etc. Now a medium-sized apple has 100 Calories, which doesn’t sound too scary.
Do We Store and Burn Calories?
We can derive energy by converting carbohydrates (or sugars), fats, and even proteins. This energy is measured in calories or Calories. So, technically, we don’t burn calories, and we don’t store calories. To understand this, we can think about the example of car fuel, also known as gasoline.
The caloric value of gasoline is 31,000 kilocalories or 31 megacalories per gallon. Do we burn calories when we run the engine and drive the car? No. We burn gasoline. However, if need be, we can use calories to measure the energy derived from the combustion of the fuel.
But, once again, the world of nutrition is not that simple. For the purpose of simplicity, let’s just say that we store and burn calories – but you know better than that, right!?
Most of the unused calories get stored in our bodies in the form of glycogen or fat (mostly fat, because the maximum amount of glycogen that can be stored in a body is somewhat limited). Therefore, by that logic, you would think that sitting must fill us with energy, just like the Energizer Bunny. I think our ever-expanding waistlines are a sure testament to that.
I don’t see too many people hopping like bunnies on their way to their cars as they leave the office. As a matter of fact, despite all of the stored energy we carry with us, we rarely feel energized. When we get out of the chair at the end of the day, we feel drained and sluggish, just wanting to sit down again. Why is that?
Once again, we must look at the bigger picture. (Continue reading...)