If you are an average adult American male who weighs 180 pounds (82 kilograms), your rate of energy expenditure while resting quietly in a chair is approximately seventy calories per hour. This is your resting metabolic rate (RMR), so named because your resting metabolism comprises all the chemical reactions going on in your body while you are not being physically active. Based on your RMR, we can calculate that if you do nothing but sit in a chair for the next twenty-four hours, your body will expend about seventeen hundred calories.
