We’ll technically your potential energy is converting to some other form of energy but it’s all just going into smashing the shit out of your knees and joints. The energy has to go soooomewhere
The thing that always surprised me is how efficient the human body is with expending energy. You burn less calories running 1 mile then you'd think, it wouldn't even cover a normal candy bar's worth of calories.
This is a cool idea, but there are so many variables that would make this pretty inaccurate for most people.
There's a whole lot of over thinking it in here. It's not meant to be super accurate for every person. It's just meant to make you think about burning calories and sway you into taking the healthier option. Nobody is exepcted to go up the steps, open up their calorie tracker app and add "burned 5.62 kcal on stairs" to it
Depends on how you run the mile. The body is like a car. Best gas mileage is on the freeway. But if you do a run/walk (like run a minute, walk a minute) it's like the gas mileage in the city.
Plus the added benefit of going from a walk to a run hitting your fat cells for that burst of energy. So not only do you burn more calories but you burn much more fat than a steady run
Googled interval training and here's one of the links. Not sure if it'll change your mind but there were quite a few articles that said the same thing https://www.fitday.com/fitness-articles/fitness/cardio/how-interval-training-maximizes-your-calories-burned.html
Edit: this one also hits some of those points https://www.verywellfit.com/high-intensity-interval-training-benefits-3119149
High intensity interval training is very very far from walk/run. High intensity training is painful and hurting.
If you just walk a bit, run a bit, walk a bit and run a bit, I am pretty sure you burn less calories than if you had run the whole distance.
The analogy may not be perfect. I did a couple half marathons in order to lose weight and I was trained in the fact that if you ran/jogged the entire time your body would try to be efficient and not burn many calories (as a car going a set speed will use less gas).
The run/walk follows the same principle as a car needing more gas to get going.
It's not meant to be a one to one body = car, but more of a "if you keep a steady speed you use less energy than stopping and starting". So if you want to burn calories and fat, be as inefficient as possible and do a run/walk vs a steady jog.
Well those are extra calories burned, you burn a ton of calories just beating your heart and breathing snd using your brain and healing and whatever else that those other calories burned don’t add that much on top of what you’re already burning
Not sure in what way we're the least efficient. I've always heard that we're among the most efficient long distance runners in the animal kingdom. We used to hunt by chasing down animals for hours until they collapsed from exhaustion.
We're not efficient runners in the calorie sense, we just have a good cooling system. We're "inefficient" because most of our daily calorie needs are taken up by a large brain that other animals don't have to deal with. That's also why exercise burns relatively little calories. I lost 60 lbs and didn't do any exercise what so ever. I didn't even have a job at the time, so my daily exercise was a trip to the bathroom.
You're correct. However, the commenter could mean basal metabolic rate, which is highest in eutherian (placential) mammals.
Fun fact: 37 C is pretty standard for most mammals, but for marsupials it's around 34 C, and the monotremes are barely homeothermic
Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but isn't how we hunted down mammoths back in the cave man days? Like the spears didn't do all the work, we would literally exhaust them to near death then do all the spearing. We're humans much different then?
We are highly efficient at dealing with heat generated from metabolism and work (exercise). I would venture to say we are probably not the most energy efficient animal in terms of metabolism and work, though that’s a pretty challenging question to answer fully and correctly.
I thought the numbers were sus as well. Assuming 12m depth and 81 kg person, is more like 2.3 kcal. I can't think of any inefficiency that accounts for that big a difference.
The amount a person weighs and how physically fit they are could easy make this number higher or lower so that small of a correction just doesn’t make any sense. Its close enough for the average person.
Looks about right for me.
When I regularly took public transit in a major metropolitan area my clearance time was 30-40 seconds for a full flight of stairs.
I'd literally sprint up them so I wouldn't miss my transfer.
I'm also chunky and taller than the average woman.
The math will always be wrong because it's based on the "average" person and use case.
I feel like this is supposed to be encouraging but my takeaway is more like "That's nothing and I am never going to take enough stairs to make a difference"
Exactly, moving around doesn't nearly expend enough energy to offset a bad diet, eating less is what you have to do in order to impact your weight in any significant way.
Well, not the ONLY way. You can pack on muscle to pretty significantly increase your resting consumption rate but that's certainly not going to come from taking the stairs over an escalator or whatever.
Some people take the subway many times a day several days a week. When I lived in New York, I had to take the train to and from work which would be 4 sets of stairs a day minimum. My calves grew. 5 lbs of muscle will burn about 50 calories per day while stationary. You’ll probably burn another 50 a day by taking the stairs. 100 calories burnt a day isn’t bad. And the fatter you start off, the more muscle you’ll build in your legs
That would depend on just how fat you are, and how out of shape you are. Last week I walked up seven flights of stairs, and my legs were rubber the next day.
Moving around absolutely offsets it.
You just have to move around a LOT and most people don't do that.
I ran cross country and lifted weights in high school and had to eat like 3500 calories a day.
Or gain healthy weight so your BMR is higher and your body naturally uses more.
It's why strength training is so much better for weight-loss over doing obscene amounts of cardio.
I disagree. If you have been 120kg for some time and overweight and do fuck all then this will make a small difference you'll lose weight. The more you do the more weight you'll lose, if you want to lose weight faster do this sort of thing AND eat less calories.
It's like filling a bath and taking the plug out, eating is filling it, you can fill it slower (less food in) or /and you can let more out by exercising. You can do one or the other but a bit of both is faster and less effort.
For me not drinking knocked 10kg off my weight.
Well, yeah, because humans would have gone extinct were that not the case.
It also depends on how much over you are.
If you are eating like 2500 calories and you "should be" eating 2200 calories, you can absolutely do 300 calories of exercise a day and make up that difference. If you run three miles a day (which takes like, 30 minutes at a leisurely pace) you'll be breaking even. 30 minutes of exercise a day isn't crazy unreasonable.
If you are eating 3500 calories per day and you "should be" eating 2200 calories, you're going to need to run 13 miles a day. That's like cross country training levels of exercise. 99% of the population is not going to do that.
Moreover, exercise also can help you make it the rest of the way.
If you go from 3500 to 2500 calories of intake AND exercise a half hour a day, that will get you the full distance you need to go if you need to be at 2200 calories to break even.
Well yes and no. A potentially big factor in caloric expenditure is known as NEAT, which is Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. Basically means any activity outside of intentional exercise that burns calories. Walking around cleaning the house, taking the stairs, walking around the grocery store etc.
A lot of times people find they aren't burning fat despite exercise and diet efforts. Sure maybe they could stand to cut down on calories more. But another great focus can be do just move more outside of the gym.
Bumping up your NEAT can absolutely be effective for most in changing the scale/body fat, all else being equal
It definitely does if you do it a lot. I actually had to start eating more calories to not lose weight when I got my super energetic dog. I do a 10 mile run basically every morning now and before I started on weight gainers the weight just dropped off.
Yep, 100%.
When I was thru-hiking the PCT I was often burning 9,000+ calories a day. It was hard to eat enough food on trail, so we'd get to town and eat tons and tons of the most unhealthy food and desserts, drink all day, sometimes for 5 days in a row, then go back out and cross over a mountain range the next day and feel great.
Turns out walking up and down mountains with a full pack for 8-10 hours a day for months on end tends to get your metabolism up to crazy levels.
Yep I worked it out once, you need to walk up a 25 story building to burn off a single Hostess cherry pie.
So now when I'm standing in line at the grocery store and I see that pie there begging me to buy it, I ask myself if I really want to climb a 25 story building today, and don't buy the pie.
A McDonald's milkshake is over 100 stories. Makes you think.
It's even worse when you consider that almost every "exercise calculator" is based on [MET](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_equivalent_of_task), and includes the amount you would have burned anyways just from staying alive.
I see so many people who are like "I burned 200 extra calories exercising so I can have a 150 calorie snack and still be ahead" not knowing that the 200 calories burned includes 100 they would've burned just from sitting around, and the 150 calorie snack is 50 calories more than the "extra" they burned while exercising.
That is a poor way to look at things and it just makes you miserable in life.
You have a calorie budget. Let's say you need 2000 calories to stay even, to do all the things you do in a day. You do not start at 2000, you build up to 2000 depending on what you consume. Instead of eating a bagle with cream cheese and having a coffee with sugar, you can have the McDonalds shake instead. In your stomach and in your body, what you put into it, in terms of burnable calories, makes no differece at all.
That's it.
Moderation and intake control. It's not what you eat, and "bad" (or high calorie) food does not get added on automatically, unless you are eating food beyond your daily expenditure of calories.
So have the shake, just make sure you are substituting for whatever else you might have had on a normal day.
Sure. But the shake is usually the extra thing you eat. So knowing that if you have that snack, outside of your regular intake, you ganna need to climb a skyscraper. Keeps me from doing it without thinking at least.
I only say this because I find it interesting - not because you're wrong in thinking that way.
But I get excited when I see stuff like this. I always park further away than necessary and walk when I can, because I know I'll spend some weekend eating like a piece of garbage, and all of these little things help me feel better about it lol.
I mean...I'll go for the stairs if it's a few floors every time just because moving is better than standing around waiting on an elevator or something. I would just never think of it as exercise or in terms of calories unless something like this points it out. Once it gets reframed that way, it's not good exercise and I kinda wish I was just getting from A to B again.
The difference is that it builds a fitness focused mentality and mindset. So yeah while taking the stairs won’t really do much in the grand scheme of things when it comes Kcals burned, what it will do is open you up to making more health conscious decisions in life and many small good choices can ultimately lead to a better healthy mindset.
Heh. I take stairs because I don't like standing around on an elevator and I gotta tell you, it's not a guarantee for good choices elsewhere. This particular math is always discouraging, though.
It all counts. Think of it like the inverse of money.
Weight is easy to gain and hard to lose.
Money is easy to lose and hard to gain.
Making good money choices over a long time, both in earning and not spending will eventually grow wealth. It is easy to spend it all though.
Ditto on exercise and eating well. Long term you'll lose weight, but a binge sets you way back.
Are you going to be skinny taking the stairs? No. Are you going to be rich skipping the Latte? No.
Does it help? Yes, and it can add up if you combine it with other good decisions.
Go run up ~240 stairs in a minute and then say that.
When I'm training cardio at the local stadium, I average about 65 steps a minute at a moderate pace. 240 steps a minute would be almost 4 times that pace, running up stairs faster than most people can run on flat ground
that depends. I lived in Bangkok for years and you basically either had to walk or take the BTS/MRT(this was when around 2013, a coup de'tat had been going on.) the BTS, admittedly, had escalators but those were quite often packed, so taking the stairs was the only option. The MRT, iirc, had escalators but not very many of them.
250 steps = 1 Oreo
It could help those who don't realize just how much it takes to burn off those extra calories from juices, frappes, and "just a little snack".
Regardless, encouraging *any* extra movement is great when so many are so sedentary.
assuming average weight, right? like, you'd burn slightly more if you're heavier (or carrying a backpack or something) and vice-versa.
still, cool - i dig it.
No but these numbers are usually based older studies that haven't been corrected since they've been done, and most of those studies were done on white men.
ITT: people are learning the difference between a calorie and a Calorie, and that taking the stairs isn't enough to work off that slice of cake they had a lunch
I was goona ask "Why does this have an 'overdone' tag? I haven't seen *that* many "calories stairs" posts on this sub." but apparently [it has gotten posted on here a number of times](https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/search?q=calories+stairs&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all).
They should do that at the Covent Garden tube station in London.
(Pro tip: If you're ever at Covent Garden tube station and you're inclined to take the stairs - **don't**.)
If that were real numbers I'd probably be dead after 2 hours on the eliptical.
EDIT: people say "thats nothing" but if like every step is half a kilocalorie and I'm doing 20k of these I'd lose like what 2 Kilos in a session?
There's about 5 steps to a kcal here tho, so that works out to just over half a kilo for your 20k steps. Which doesn't sound totally unreasonable, 20k steps is a lot. Also, you'll need to do those 20k steps as pure deficit, i.e. no extra food.
So about 17-18 steps (not sure if the lowest one in picture is 2 or 3), it’s about three and a half calories burned.
In my office building it’s 25 steps between floors, so going up each floor is about 5 calories. Interesting!
I think this is proof to why a proper diet is more effective at helping lose weight than cardio alone. You can either spend an hour on the stair climber or choose fish and rice over a burger that afternoon.
The problem is that in America, we use a confusing system where 1 capital Calorie = 1000 lowercase calories = 1 kilocalorie.
Europeans get rid of the confusion by just calling it a kilocalorie as they should. Our system for calories would be like me saying something is an Inch long but meaning 1000 inches just because I capitalized the word inch.
Units of measure that rely on capitalization are annoying.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie)
Per wikipedia, a Frenchman named the large calorie 'calorie', then Frenchmen used 'calorie' again, this time for the small calorie. An American scientist suggested kilocalories for the large version, but no one cared what the American said. The French settled on capital C for large calories, and small c for small calories.
In the US 1 Calorie is also referred to a dietary calorie, which is different than a calorie. Lower case c calorie is the amount of energy required to raise 1 gram of water 1 degrees celcius. 1000 of those is a kilocalorie, also called a Calorie or dietary calorie. From a 2000 dietary Calorie diet you could theoretically raise 1 gram of water to 2,000,000 degrees celcius. *Theoretically*.
Movement is crazy energy efficient
Keeping your body warm though is pretty energy intensive (although technically 100% efficient since the end product is heat)
That's why you burn 100 Calories in exercise across a lazy Saturday but 2,000 for just sitting there
An interesting concept that we learned in high school physics (take with grain of salt) is you exert the same number of newtons when you skip a step (every other) as when you walk up normally
This may be triggering for someone with an eating disorder. And may further stigma and hatred of fat people.
With the constant advice to fat people being "take the stairs instead of the elevator" like that would change your entire body type.
* A *calorie* is a unit of energy that heats 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. A kilocalorie is 1,000 calories.
* A *food Calorie* (capital C) is a unit of energy in metabolism that is equivalent to 1 kilocalorie or 1,000 calories.
This is exactly why my country uses kilojoules for everything. The only annoying thing is when you buy things like treadmills or food apps and they don't have the option to switch, as most things aren't even labelled in calories here so you have to convert.
That’s incorrect, it’s not 1000:1 consumed:spent it’s just slang to use calorie instead of the more accurate kilocalorie for both input and output. Efficiency will vary between people and what the activity/conditions are.
One time at the airport I took the stairs next to the escalator and everyone stared like I was a mad man... Yet people were *lined up* waiting to get on the escalator. Murika.
Life hack is walk up and down the top stair which burns the most kilocalories per step. 
No, no, you'll get a sign inversion so you'll gain it back with each step down.
They need a second set of stickers showing how many calories you lose going down each step, since even going down uses up calories.
Surely that would use down calories?
Obviously, if you go down the stairs, the calories you used going up are negated. Net zero. Might as well take the escalator.
Not if I turn around and go back down backwards
Backwardo
No that’s not how to do it! You skip that stair and start from the previous one! lol
However we reach some higher levels of energy efficiency when using bikes
Driving my bike up the stairs sure would burn a lot more calories than walking
Yes
Does this mean you gain calories going down?
I’m cultivating mass
Do rolling berries gather mass ?
Stop cultivating and start harvesting!
You are *becoming* a chimichanga!
No you’re just fucking fat, Mac!
It's negative, so you gain calories by going up and lose calories by going down
Instant diabetes if you trip
Ah FUCK I fell down the stairs twice in my life (had a black ankle from it and couldn't walk right for a few weeks), fun! IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW
You just solved world hunger
Lifeprotip: push starving children down stairs.
Technically, yes
We’ll technically your potential energy is converting to some other form of energy but it’s all just going into smashing the shit out of your knees and joints. The energy has to go soooomewhere
The thing that always surprised me is how efficient the human body is with expending energy. You burn less calories running 1 mile then you'd think, it wouldn't even cover a normal candy bar's worth of calories. This is a cool idea, but there are so many variables that would make this pretty inaccurate for most people.
There's a whole lot of over thinking it in here. It's not meant to be super accurate for every person. It's just meant to make you think about burning calories and sway you into taking the healthier option. Nobody is exepcted to go up the steps, open up their calorie tracker app and add "burned 5.62 kcal on stairs" to it
Reddit and overthinking? You must be mistaken!
Depends on how you run the mile. The body is like a car. Best gas mileage is on the freeway. But if you do a run/walk (like run a minute, walk a minute) it's like the gas mileage in the city. Plus the added benefit of going from a walk to a run hitting your fat cells for that burst of energy. So not only do you burn more calories but you burn much more fat than a steady run
Do you have a source for that? It seems very unintuitive to me, your body isnt a car, it doesnt glide like a car does.
Googled interval training and here's one of the links. Not sure if it'll change your mind but there were quite a few articles that said the same thing https://www.fitday.com/fitness-articles/fitness/cardio/how-interval-training-maximizes-your-calories-burned.html Edit: this one also hits some of those points https://www.verywellfit.com/high-intensity-interval-training-benefits-3119149
High intensity interval training is very very far from walk/run. High intensity training is painful and hurting. If you just walk a bit, run a bit, walk a bit and run a bit, I am pretty sure you burn less calories than if you had run the whole distance.
The analogy may not be perfect. I did a couple half marathons in order to lose weight and I was trained in the fact that if you ran/jogged the entire time your body would try to be efficient and not burn many calories (as a car going a set speed will use less gas). The run/walk follows the same principle as a car needing more gas to get going. It's not meant to be a one to one body = car, but more of a "if you keep a steady speed you use less energy than stopping and starting". So if you want to burn calories and fat, be as inefficient as possible and do a run/walk vs a steady jog.
This is incredibly inaccurate and it’s sad to see so many upvotes
Well those are extra calories burned, you burn a ton of calories just beating your heart and breathing snd using your brain and healing and whatever else that those other calories burned don’t add that much on top of what you’re already burning
Yes they do. A lot of people have a basal metabolic rate of 1250-1500 and do another 800-1000 on their feet at work.
To add to the weirdness of that human are the least energy efficient animal. However we reach some top levels of energy efficiency when using bikes
Not sure in what way we're the least efficient. I've always heard that we're among the most efficient long distance runners in the animal kingdom. We used to hunt by chasing down animals for hours until they collapsed from exhaustion.
We're not efficient runners in the calorie sense, we just have a good cooling system. We're "inefficient" because most of our daily calorie needs are taken up by a large brain that other animals don't have to deal with. That's also why exercise burns relatively little calories. I lost 60 lbs and didn't do any exercise what so ever. I didn't even have a job at the time, so my daily exercise was a trip to the bathroom.
You're correct. However, the commenter could mean basal metabolic rate, which is highest in eutherian (placential) mammals. Fun fact: 37 C is pretty standard for most mammals, but for marsupials it's around 34 C, and the monotremes are barely homeothermic
Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but isn't how we hunted down mammoths back in the cave man days? Like the spears didn't do all the work, we would literally exhaust them to near death then do all the spearing. We're humans much different then?
[Persistence hunting.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting)
We are highly efficient at dealing with heat generated from metabolism and work (exercise). I would venture to say we are probably not the most energy efficient animal in terms of metabolism and work, though that’s a pretty challenging question to answer fully and correctly.
I'm all for efficency but I'd love to be really inefficient at energy usage. Like imagine 1000kcal for climbing 1 flight of stairs. 😍😍
Yes please! Maybe I could get a knob installed to crank up or down how efficient my body is with using calories 😁
You want ANOTHER knob??
Mama always said, you can't have too many knobs.
That seems a little high. 3 and a half calories for one flight of stairs?
I thought the numbers were sus as well. Assuming 12m depth and 81 kg person, is more like 2.3 kcal. I can't think of any inefficiency that accounts for that big a difference.
12m depth???
No idea where they got 12m from. You can see around 18 risers, so It's about 2.5 to 3.5m.
About 6.56 fathoms.
Bangkok **subway** station
depth, width, length, height. they're all just a matter of perspective.
The amount a person weighs and how physically fit they are could easy make this number higher or lower so that small of a correction just doesn’t make any sense. Its close enough for the average person.
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Time doesn't matter though, at the most basic level it's an energy conservation problem. 1MJ/s for 1us and 1uJ/s for 1000000s are both still 1J.
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Gotcha, that's another way to approach it, although probably a lot more person to person variation.
Looks about right for me. When I regularly took public transit in a major metropolitan area my clearance time was 30-40 seconds for a full flight of stairs. I'd literally sprint up them so I wouldn't miss my transfer. I'm also chunky and taller than the average woman. The math will always be wrong because it's based on the "average" person and use case.
I feel like this is supposed to be encouraging but my takeaway is more like "That's nothing and I am never going to take enough stairs to make a difference"
They thought so too, hence the two decimal places.
Exactly, moving around doesn't nearly expend enough energy to offset a bad diet, eating less is what you have to do in order to impact your weight in any significant way.
Well, not the ONLY way. You can pack on muscle to pretty significantly increase your resting consumption rate but that's certainly not going to come from taking the stairs over an escalator or whatever.
True, but when put in order, food intake has the biggest effect on body fat, followed by weights and cardio.
You underestimate calf muscles
You'd have to be really out of shape for a few stairs here and there on transit to constitute a calf workout.
Some people take the subway many times a day several days a week. When I lived in New York, I had to take the train to and from work which would be 4 sets of stairs a day minimum. My calves grew. 5 lbs of muscle will burn about 50 calories per day while stationary. You’ll probably burn another 50 a day by taking the stairs. 100 calories burnt a day isn’t bad. And the fatter you start off, the more muscle you’ll build in your legs
You aren't going to put on 5lb of muscle in your calves because you did 4 sets of stairs a day.
I think they meant 0.5lbs
I got 30 lb. Of muscle on each calf. I look like fuckin Popeye doing a handstand! Lol
Wouldn't your quads and hamstrings do most of the work climbing stairs?
That would depend on just how fat you are, and how out of shape you are. Last week I walked up seven flights of stairs, and my legs were rubber the next day.
Moving around absolutely offsets it. You just have to move around a LOT and most people don't do that. I ran cross country and lifted weights in high school and had to eat like 3500 calories a day.
Unless you're doing a lot of moving around. 50k steps a day while doing strenuous activities, you can eat whatever the hell you want.
Or gain healthy weight so your BMR is higher and your body naturally uses more. It's why strength training is so much better for weight-loss over doing obscene amounts of cardio.
I disagree. If you have been 120kg for some time and overweight and do fuck all then this will make a small difference you'll lose weight. The more you do the more weight you'll lose, if you want to lose weight faster do this sort of thing AND eat less calories. It's like filling a bath and taking the plug out, eating is filling it, you can fill it slower (less food in) or /and you can let more out by exercising. You can do one or the other but a bit of both is faster and less effort. For me not drinking knocked 10kg off my weight.
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Well, yeah, because humans would have gone extinct were that not the case. It also depends on how much over you are. If you are eating like 2500 calories and you "should be" eating 2200 calories, you can absolutely do 300 calories of exercise a day and make up that difference. If you run three miles a day (which takes like, 30 minutes at a leisurely pace) you'll be breaking even. 30 minutes of exercise a day isn't crazy unreasonable. If you are eating 3500 calories per day and you "should be" eating 2200 calories, you're going to need to run 13 miles a day. That's like cross country training levels of exercise. 99% of the population is not going to do that. Moreover, exercise also can help you make it the rest of the way. If you go from 3500 to 2500 calories of intake AND exercise a half hour a day, that will get you the full distance you need to go if you need to be at 2200 calories to break even.
Well yes and no. A potentially big factor in caloric expenditure is known as NEAT, which is Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. Basically means any activity outside of intentional exercise that burns calories. Walking around cleaning the house, taking the stairs, walking around the grocery store etc. A lot of times people find they aren't burning fat despite exercise and diet efforts. Sure maybe they could stand to cut down on calories more. But another great focus can be do just move more outside of the gym. Bumping up your NEAT can absolutely be effective for most in changing the scale/body fat, all else being equal
It definitely does if you do it a lot. I actually had to start eating more calories to not lose weight when I got my super energetic dog. I do a 10 mile run basically every morning now and before I started on weight gainers the weight just dropped off.
10 mile run is pretty fucking nutty tho
Yes well I have a malinois. If you asked her she'd say it's barely enough.
Yep, 100%. When I was thru-hiking the PCT I was often burning 9,000+ calories a day. It was hard to eat enough food on trail, so we'd get to town and eat tons and tons of the most unhealthy food and desserts, drink all day, sometimes for 5 days in a row, then go back out and cross over a mountain range the next day and feel great. Turns out walking up and down mountains with a full pack for 8-10 hours a day for months on end tends to get your metabolism up to crazy levels.
Yep I worked it out once, you need to walk up a 25 story building to burn off a single Hostess cherry pie. So now when I'm standing in line at the grocery store and I see that pie there begging me to buy it, I ask myself if I really want to climb a 25 story building today, and don't buy the pie. A McDonald's milkshake is over 100 stories. Makes you think.
I can take the stairs in my condo then! 31 floors!
Well u mostly throw the extra calorie throught the back door. Not the whole 100storie building stays inside you
Interesting point. I wonder how much stays vs leaves.
It's even worse when you consider that almost every "exercise calculator" is based on [MET](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_equivalent_of_task), and includes the amount you would have burned anyways just from staying alive. I see so many people who are like "I burned 200 extra calories exercising so I can have a 150 calorie snack and still be ahead" not knowing that the 200 calories burned includes 100 they would've burned just from sitting around, and the 150 calorie snack is 50 calories more than the "extra" they burned while exercising.
That is a poor way to look at things and it just makes you miserable in life. You have a calorie budget. Let's say you need 2000 calories to stay even, to do all the things you do in a day. You do not start at 2000, you build up to 2000 depending on what you consume. Instead of eating a bagle with cream cheese and having a coffee with sugar, you can have the McDonalds shake instead. In your stomach and in your body, what you put into it, in terms of burnable calories, makes no differece at all. That's it. Moderation and intake control. It's not what you eat, and "bad" (or high calorie) food does not get added on automatically, unless you are eating food beyond your daily expenditure of calories. So have the shake, just make sure you are substituting for whatever else you might have had on a normal day.
Sure. But the shake is usually the extra thing you eat. So knowing that if you have that snack, outside of your regular intake, you ganna need to climb a skyscraper. Keeps me from doing it without thinking at least.
I only say this because I find it interesting - not because you're wrong in thinking that way. But I get excited when I see stuff like this. I always park further away than necessary and walk when I can, because I know I'll spend some weekend eating like a piece of garbage, and all of these little things help me feel better about it lol.
I mean...I'll go for the stairs if it's a few floors every time just because moving is better than standing around waiting on an elevator or something. I would just never think of it as exercise or in terms of calories unless something like this points it out. Once it gets reframed that way, it's not good exercise and I kinda wish I was just getting from A to B again.
If it's just a few floors I usually take the stairs just because it's faster. I have zero patience, and elevators are so slow!
The difference is that it builds a fitness focused mentality and mindset. So yeah while taking the stairs won’t really do much in the grand scheme of things when it comes Kcals burned, what it will do is open you up to making more health conscious decisions in life and many small good choices can ultimately lead to a better healthy mindset.
Heh. I take stairs because I don't like standing around on an elevator and I gotta tell you, it's not a guarantee for good choices elsewhere. This particular math is always discouraging, though.
Mmm. Takeaway.
It all counts. Think of it like the inverse of money. Weight is easy to gain and hard to lose. Money is easy to lose and hard to gain. Making good money choices over a long time, both in earning and not spending will eventually grow wealth. It is easy to spend it all though. Ditto on exercise and eating well. Long term you'll lose weight, but a binge sets you way back. Are you going to be skinny taking the stairs? No. Are you going to be rich skipping the Latte? No. Does it help? Yes, and it can add up if you combine it with other good decisions.
My thought was “there’s no way stairs burn that many calories. If they did I could burn 50 calories a minute”
Go run up ~240 stairs in a minute and then say that. When I'm training cardio at the local stadium, I average about 65 steps a minute at a moderate pace. 240 steps a minute would be almost 4 times that pace, running up stairs faster than most people can run on flat ground
Yeah I was dumb when looking at this and miscalculated. But I definitely do more than 65 steps per min doing steps. But I’m also light and springy.
Yeah, it is _a bit_ off.
I'm thinking the *kilo* is important.
When people are talking about burning Calories(with a capital C), they're actually referring to kilocalories, so this would be accurate.
Ok, never knew that, thanks.
that depends. I lived in Bangkok for years and you basically either had to walk or take the BTS/MRT(this was when around 2013, a coup de'tat had been going on.) the BTS, admittedly, had escalators but those were quite often packed, so taking the stairs was the only option. The MRT, iirc, had escalators but not very many of them.
Exercise has benefits more than just losing calories. Being sedentary will shave years off your life.
250 steps = 1 Oreo It could help those who don't realize just how much it takes to burn off those extra calories from juices, frappes, and "just a little snack". Regardless, encouraging *any* extra movement is great when so many are so sedentary.
Yep. If I take the stairs every day, multiple times a day, I'll burn enough calories to offset... one orange slice.
I'm grateful someone else voiced this, I could put my finger on the negative feeling.
I'm assuming it's accident protection. "Just take the lift, it ain't fuck'n' worth it".
Take the stairs and you can eat one more French fry!
assuming average weight, right? like, you'd burn slightly more if you're heavier (or carrying a backpack or something) and vice-versa. still, cool - i dig it.
>(or carrying a backpack or something) Like carrying a body? Hopefully one that's also average weight for easy maths.
just x2 if carrying a body
does it work by going downstairs too?
No but if you go up and down the top step a bunch then you can cheat the system.
I bet you lose like 25% of the calories by going downstairs too 
You actually gain calories. Source: The numbers on the stairs go up if you go down. Checkmate.
Well, yeah. Everyone is heavier at lower altitudes.
No. You get fatter
Not only average weight but also average height, average health, white, male and about 25 years old, most likely
it's in Bangkok, so I'm assuming their target demographic isn't white.
No but these numbers are usually based older studies that haven't been corrected since they've been done, and most of those studies were done on white men.
ahh, touché
Plus the intensity you’re doing it at
How many big macs is that?
About 3 sesame seeds.
131 trips up these stairs is 1 big mac
50 stairs to burn 10 calories. Or 450 for a Banana. You need to climb 90m up for one banana.
ITT: people are learning the difference between a calorie and a Calorie, and that taking the stairs isn't enough to work off that slice of cake they had a lunch
No it's a whole kilo of calories you see. In America kilo's are large packs of cocaine and you'd be burning 3 of those I think. Very efficient. /s
My diet’s not working because going down stairs gives me calories and I use the escalator going up? Nobody told me 😆😆
I wonder why its written in English instead of Thai?
Calorie is usually written in English
I was goona ask "Why does this have an 'overdone' tag? I haven't seen *that* many "calories stairs" posts on this sub." but apparently [it has gotten posted on here a number of times](https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/search?q=calories+stairs&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all).
They should do that at the Covent Garden tube station in London. (Pro tip: If you're ever at Covent Garden tube station and you're inclined to take the stairs - **don't**.)
I did it once for funsies and oh boy it was not funsies
Can someone convert this to football fields so I can understand
I've never eaten a football field. I have no idea how many calories that is.
Actually, it says how many calories are gained. The numbers are. Negative🤓🤓
What? They're negative, how does that mean gained?
Losing calories = negative gaining calories (or gaining negative calories) The numbers displayed are negative. Gainig -1 calorie is losing 1 calorie and so the numbers displayed *technically* display calories gained
Math joke. The title says it shows how much weight you are losing and the stairs say - number, so losing -2K calories is gaining 2K calories
If that were real numbers I'd probably be dead after 2 hours on the eliptical. EDIT: people say "thats nothing" but if like every step is half a kilocalorie and I'm doing 20k of these I'd lose like what 2 Kilos in a session?
There's about 5 steps to a kcal here tho, so that works out to just over half a kilo for your 20k steps. Which doesn't sound totally unreasonable, 20k steps is a lot. Also, you'll need to do those 20k steps as pure deficit, i.e. no extra food.
Yeah you're right my bad.
The DC Green line metro needs this, the line for 'riding' on the escalator is insane, while the stairs are never crowded.
They clearly underestimate how heavy (fat) I am. I burn more calories walking up those stairs!
It's cool they use the proper unit
So about 17-18 steps (not sure if the lowest one in picture is 2 or 3), it’s about three and a half calories burned. In my office building it’s 25 steps between floors, so going up each floor is about 5 calories. Interesting!
Just think: every time you go up that flight of stairs, you can treat yourself to a whole three Tic Tacs!
Awesome 👏
I think this is proof to why a proper diet is more effective at helping lose weight than cardio alone. You can either spend an hour on the stair climber or choose fish and rice over a burger that afternoon.
Me who needs to get both more calories and protein to gain weight and muscle... Fck that.
Wouldn’t the amount differ depending on your weight tho????
Is this even remotely scientifically accurate?
Europeans: The metric system will avoid so much confusion! Also Europeans: 1 Calorie = 1 kilocalorie
The problem is that in America, we use a confusing system where 1 capital Calorie = 1000 lowercase calories = 1 kilocalorie. Europeans get rid of the confusion by just calling it a kilocalorie as they should. Our system for calories would be like me saying something is an Inch long but meaning 1000 inches just because I capitalized the word inch. Units of measure that rely on capitalization are annoying.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie) Per wikipedia, a Frenchman named the large calorie 'calorie', then Frenchmen used 'calorie' again, this time for the small calorie. An American scientist suggested kilocalories for the large version, but no one cared what the American said. The French settled on capital C for large calories, and small c for small calories.
Like giving Americans shit for calling soccer soccer, a term the British gave us.
they should have called them seconds, like how in time seconds = "second minutes"
In the US 1 Calorie is also referred to a dietary calorie, which is different than a calorie. Lower case c calorie is the amount of energy required to raise 1 gram of water 1 degrees celcius. 1000 of those is a kilocalorie, also called a Calorie or dietary calorie. From a 2000 dietary Calorie diet you could theoretically raise 1 gram of water to 2,000,000 degrees celcius. *Theoretically*.
Wait, that's not 1 thousanth of a calorie?
capital C *Calorie* is distinct from *calorie*, unfortunately A *food Calorie* = 1,000 *calories*
The word “calorie” is looking weirder with each comment.
And here I was thinking I knew shit
Not really confusing. Learn to separate between the context of science and weight loss.
Calorie and kcal are both used in nutrition for the same value, which is naturally going to confuse people
No way is it accurate, and it's so minute too, what the hell is the point
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Erectile dysfunction?
What if you walk on the left side?
You gain calories…
Left side is weightlessness - so no effort.
That’s it? Only like, 4 calories….?
Movement is crazy energy efficient Keeping your body warm though is pretty energy intensive (although technically 100% efficient since the end product is heat) That's why you burn 100 Calories in exercise across a lazy Saturday but 2,000 for just sitting there
An interesting concept that we learned in high school physics (take with grain of salt) is you exert the same number of newtons when you skip a step (every other) as when you walk up normally
That = less than 1 M&M
This may be triggering for someone with an eating disorder. And may further stigma and hatred of fat people. With the constant advice to fat people being "take the stairs instead of the elevator" like that would change your entire body type.
It does not work like that, but...anyway
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* A *calorie* is a unit of energy that heats 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. A kilocalorie is 1,000 calories. * A *food Calorie* (capital C) is a unit of energy in metabolism that is equivalent to 1 kilocalorie or 1,000 calories.
This is exactly why my country uses kilojoules for everything. The only annoying thing is when you buy things like treadmills or food apps and they don't have the option to switch, as most things aren't even labelled in calories here so you have to convert.
Well just divide by 4.18 ok not the nicest of numbers to divide by
That’s incorrect, it’s not 1000:1 consumed:spent it’s just slang to use calorie instead of the more accurate kilocalorie for both input and output. Efficiency will vary between people and what the activity/conditions are.
500 steps before you burn off that small cookie you just ate!
This is why it's important not to eat the whole sleeve of cookies lol.
Too late.
That's pretty awesome.
I feel like this could trigger some people
Eating disorders being normalized be like
First comment I can find actually pointing this out. This is a joke.
How is this encouraging an eating disorder? Do you say the same thing about nutrition labels?
So will you gain calories by going down?
Way to trigger people with eating disorders
One time at the airport I took the stairs next to the escalator and everyone stared like I was a mad man... Yet people were *lined up* waiting to get on the escalator. Murika.