How Much Does It Take To Burn Off Calories?

I’m sure you’ve heard of calories – and you may track how many of them you eat, but how meaningful are they? I mean what is a calorie?

There’s been a suggestion that food should be labelled with how much activity would be required to burn it off.

For example: a slice of cake may be 300 calories or 50 minutes brisk walking.

I think this is a really good idea because “calories” to most of us is just a word. Although some of us may know exactly how many calories there are in certain foods we eat (chocolate digestive has 87 depending on brand) considerably fewer of us would know what that really means.

We don’t use calories to measure anything else so they seem abstract.

If you knew that a biscuit was a 15 minute brisk walk that would probably be more meaningful to you.

That tempting triangular chocolatey crunchy Tiffin in Costa would be 511 calories and would take 85 minutes to walk off! It does make you think twice.

How about other exercise? OK – how about race cycling – that would burn 13 calories each minute so the Tiffin would be burnt off in 40 minutes.

I don’t know about you, but 40 minutes of race cycling definitely makes me think twice.

The astute amongst you may have spotted that I've been writing calories incorrectly. I have. Actually the units we casually talk about as "calories" are kilo-calories – that makes them seem even more remote from our understanding – so each calorie is actually tiny and that Tiffin is 511 kcals or 511,000 true calories.

Brisk walking seems like a good measurement to use and burns about 6 kcals per minute. Brisk walking is something that is easy to incorporate in to daily life.

Leisurely cycling would burn about 6.5 kcals per minute whereas race cycling is really fast burning at about 13 kcals per minute, but probably too intense for many people.

Light jogging would be 8.5 kcals per minute and more people would be able to do this.


These figures are based on a 65 kg individual – how much you would burn would be different in reality, but the principal is still true.

The suggestion about food labelling was made by the Royal Society of Public Health writing in the British Medical Journal. Here’s a link to the BBC News item about it - Call for exercise advice on food labels