A century in 6 hours.
100 / 6 = 17 mph That is moving.
Eight lbs X 3500 calories / lb = 28,000 calories
153 calories in a 12 oz beer (depends on brand)
28,000 calories / 153 calories per beer = 183 beers
Good reason to bike!
You could even have Pizza with the beer.
You've convinced me. Maybe, I'll even join the League of American Wheelmen or whatever they are called.
This is the kind of broken thinking that what I'll call the "popular fitness media" loves, because it sells running shoes, running clothes, sunglasses, hats, mp3 players, drinks bottles etc. Billions of dollars of merchandise hanging off the idea that physical activity burns a significant amount of calories per unit of time. It doesn't.
When I fill my car up at the gas station, it takes me just under a minute to put enough gas in the car to travel 180 to 200 miles. Travelling that distance, in a pre-COVID-19-lockdown world, the way my life worked, it took about 8 or 9 hours which was 3 journeys per week spread over 3 weeks. The key point here is that it's ~60 seconds putting the fuel in, and between 28,800 and 32,400 seconds burning it off. The numbers and the exact ratio are not important. It's the size of the disparity I want to focus on.
The same thing applies to food and exercise.
Imagine a donut. One of those large, glazed affairs with a gooey filling and sprinkles on top. How long does it it take someone to eat one of those? Let's exclude breaks in eating (maybe they're at their desk in the office and they're interrupted by a phone call etc.) and focus on the cumulative time spent biting, chewing and swallowing. It takes them 5 minutes to eat the donut if they're slow about it. I'd demolish one of those things in less than 2 minutes, no problem.
How long would it take a person to burn off the number of calories contained in the donut by running on a treadmill in a gym? Probably a couple of hours running at a pace fast enough that you were unable to talk.
Eating the donut is like fuelling the car. A few seconds or perhaps minutes to put the fuel in, but
HOURS or
DAYS burning it off.
How long does it take to
not eat a donut? Zero seconds.
Yeah sure we can go down the rabbit hole of looking at how the skinny, lean, experienced female runner who is 5' 4" and weighs 110 pounds will burn less calories in that time than the massively fat 6' 3" guy who weighs 260 pounds who has only been running for a week or two, or that rowing might burn more calories than running because you're using more muscle etc.
It's still not going to get anyone to a point where the 3 minutes of eating a donut can be undone by running for just 10 minutes on a treadmill. If it was that easy, we'd have very few obese people on the planet.
I had a friend years back who was a personal trainer who was focused on food intake and weight training, no cardio. He'd prove this point by getting people to run on a treadmill. He'd give them a banana to hold in one hand like a relay baton as they ran. He'd leave them running for 5 minutes. He then come back to them, take the banana from them, peel it, just little bit, bite a quarter or so of the banana off the end, eat it in front of them, and then give the rest of the banana back to them to hold. They'd keep on running, getting really tired now and at that point he'd tell them:
"The amount of banana I just ate represents the amount of calories you've burned in the last 5 minutes. Do you want to try and burn the whole banana?"
Nobody wanted to burn the whole banana.
Usually when I bring this up, someone is always really quick to jump in and say that exercise is more than just about losing weight it has a myriad of other benefits too etc. Sure. I agree with you. I'm not arguing against that and saying that you should be some sedentary weirdo. I'm saying that controlling the amount of stuff going into your pie hole is the ONLY thing that really controls your bodyweight.
There are millions of misinformed people across the developed world whose primary reason for performing some kind of exercise is that they want to lose weight. They look in the mirror in the mornings and see this huge amorphous blob of a person and they want to change so they start running or some nonsense. Sure they tighten up their diet and they lose the first 20 pounds or whatever but even after that they're still very obviously fat. They persist a bit, but they begin to fall into the mindset of justifying eating the donut because they worked so hard in the gym earlier today, or to flip the thing on its head, they justify that they can eat the donut now because they'll just burn it off later in the gym.
The fact is, they won't even come close to burning off the donut, and we all know these people are eating more than just the donut. By the time you add up all the candy, pastries, ice cream, cookies here, soda there, it's got to the point where running a marathon every day might do the trick. Maybe. But do you have time for that?
Final analogy. Burning calories through physical activity in the hope of losing weight is like trying to empty a swimming pool with a coffee cup. Theoretically it's possible, but you're going to quit long before you've achieved any appreciable results because you'll be bored, tired and frustrated.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6914918/?fbclid=IwAR02MB4IKeBT6LJ6QHdV1y98TrDboDRdNgC1Q18azUow_IPkc7Hhthbid5k