How many calories do you burn doing nothing?
Nothing is the baseline, and the baseline is most of your day. An adult lying still for 24 hours still spends somewhere between 1,400 and 1,900 kcal — their basal metabolic rate. What makes the question interesting is how little the alternatives to lying still add.
Sleeping: the biggest number nobody counts
Sleep costs roughly 0.9 kcal per kilogram of bodyweight per hour — about 0.4 kcal per pound — a little below quiet waking rest, because core temperature and sympathetic activity both fall.
| Bodyweight | Per hour | Over 8 hours | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 55 kg | 120 lb | ~50 kcal | ~395 kcal |
| 70 kg | 155 lb | ~63 kcal | ~505 kcal |
| 85 kg | 185 lb | ~77 kcal | ~610 kcal |
| 100 kg | 220 lb | ~90 kcal | ~720 kcal |
So most adults burn 400 to 600 kcal overnight, which is more than an hour in the weights room and comparable to a decent run. Variation between sleep stages is real but small — a few percent — and not worth thinking about.
Two things follow. Sleeping longer does not create a deficit; you simply spend at the resting rate for more of the day instead of a slightly higher one, and if anything the arithmetic runs the other way, since short sleep is reliably associated with eating more. More usefully: the large numbers in your day are the ones you have no say over. That is the shape of the whole problem.
Sitting: your resting rate plus a rounding error
Sitting quietly runs at about 1.0–1.3 METs, or roughly 70–90 kcal an hour for a 70 kg (155 lb) adult. An eight-hour desk day therefore costs somewhere near 560–700 kcal, essentially all of which is the burn you would have had lying on the floor instead.
Typing, fidgeting, shifting about and getting up for the kettle are what move you toward the top of that range. They are also, as it turns out, where the interesting part lives.
Standing: the number everybody inflates
You will see standing desks credited with 50 kcal an hour over sitting, sometimes more. That figure does not survive contact with calorimetry.
The honest difference between sitting and standing still is roughly 8 to 15 kcal per hour for a typical adult — a gap of about 0.1–0.2 METs. Which means:
- Three hours standing a day, five days a week: roughly 120–225 kcal a week. One chocolate biscuit.
- A year of that, with nothing else changed: perhaps 0.8–1.5 kg (2–3 lb).
Where does 50 kcal come from? Largely from studies measuring standing and moving — pacing, weight-shifting, stepping away from the desk — rather than standing motionless. Which is the real finding, and a better one: the benefit sits in the movement that standing makes likely, not in being vertical.
“Sitting is the new smoking”
Two different claims travel under that slogan, and they deserve separating.
The calorie claim does not hold up. Replacing sitting with standing does not meaningfully change energy balance. You cannot stand your way out of a 500 kcal shortfall, and a standing desk is not a weight-loss intervention.
The health claim is a separate literature and stands on its own. Prolonged uninterrupted sitting is associated with worse cardiometabolic markers substantially independently of bodyweight and of how much you exercise, and breaking it up at intervals appears to matter. It simply does not matter for arithmetic reasons.
Conflating the two is how a defensible health message became a poor weight-loss tip.
NEAT: where the variance actually lives
Non-exercise activity thermogenesis is everything you burn moving that is not deliberate exercise. Walking to the station, cooking, stairs, carrying shopping, pacing on a phone call, fidgeting.
For most people it is 200–600 kcal a day, and it is by a wide margin the most variable part of the budget. Two people of the same size can differ by several hundred kilocalories a day on this alone, and one person differs from themselves according to weather, mood, workload and — crucially — whether they are dieting. NEAT falls in a deficit, quietly and without asking. That downward drift is one of the main reasons a carefully calculated deficit delivers less than it promised, and why maintenance is better measured than estimated.
It is also why NEAT outweighs any single workout. A session is a bounded 300–500 kcal you do perhaps three times a week. NEAT is a few hundred kilocalories every single day, available to be nudged up continuously — and the thing your body will nudge down if you stop paying attention. Ten thousand steps is, in effect, a deliberate way of defending it.
The useful reading
Doing nothing burns a great deal. Doing slightly more than nothing adds very little. Taken together, posture is not a lever worth pulling, and the one that is sits on the other side of the equation: set intake against your real maintenance figure, keep training for what training is good at, and treat incidental movement as something to protect while you diet rather than something to cash in.
General information, not medical advice.