🔥 The Unseen 3,600 Calorie Burners: ADHD and Energy Expenditure

Introduction: In today’s post I’ll be talking about:

• How my ADHD helps me burn 3,600+ calories daily! Unexpected benefit

• The physical and mental contributors

• Other factors

• Personal reflection  

Context:

According to my smart watch, I burn on average 3,657 calories a day! With the highest being 4,548!

When I shared this statistic with some physically active friends, they could not believe it. They’re averaging 2,700 calories burned on an active day. They thought I was cheating…

I genuinely believed burning 3,000+ calories was normal, and when I mentioned this at a BBQ party with some friends I got laughed at! Like burning 3,000 calories daily was some walk in the park.

At that time, I had a Fitbit watch, so I thought, perhaps the watch was faulty. It ended up breaking after some time, so I purchased a Whoop watch, the result was pretty much the same.

Even on days when I haven’t worked out or I’m working from home, I tend to burn around 2,500+ calories!

Reflection:

It dawned on me that there’s probably something fishy here. 🤔

Here’s what I discovered about myself:

I’d like to stress that inasmuch as I believe this to be my experience, they are somewhat anecdotal. 

Physical Hyperactivity and Restlessness

 I’m convinced that the below symptoms of my ADHD contribute to the calorie burn count

• Fidgeting/Tapping: I probably experience this when I’m in team meetings, and super eager to get involved.

• Not waiting for the bus. If the ETA for a bus was say 7 minutes, I’d rather walk to the next bus stop and hope to catch it there. Even though I run the risk of missing the bus entirely, the thrill and adrenaline increases my heart rate and gives me more energy to burn!

• Pacing up and down: I tend to do this a lot when I’m on the phone, I just can’t seem to sit still when on the phone! This certainly contributes to my daily step counts too. My current smart watch doesn’t track step counts but the previous one was averaging 15,000 steps per day.

Mental Exertion:

ADHD involves not just physical hyperactivity but also mental hyperactivity, which is what my psychiatrist thought I had more of. According to research the brain is one of the most energy-consuming organs in the body. Mental activities such as:

• Racing thoughts

• Multitasking

• Managing distractibility

 All might contribute to higher overall calorie expenditure.

As a Chartered Accountant, sometimes the days are just chaotic.

• Clashing deadlines

• Challenging stakeholders/business partners

• Providing accurate numbers

I have to put my executive functioning through the trenches! And at the end of it, I find myself exhausted at times.

The Role of Stress and Anxiety:

 Heightened stress levels and anxiety are by products of ADHD. I guess when I’m having these emotional states, it can further increase my metabolism due to my body’s physiological responses to stress. I tend to get this when:

• Work becomes demanding

• Family demands increase

• Friendships demands

Other Lifestyle Considerations:

For me it’s my Hyperfocus:

• This weapon enables me to give the extra push when in the gym

• When playing team sports merged with my super competitiveness I go the extra mile, not feeling tired at that moment in time. Subsequently reflects in the calories burnt count

• The hyper focus also makes me work on projects (like my newsletter) for long periods of time suppressing the usual signals of hunger or tiredness.

Personal Reflections and conclusion:

To conclude, from my anecdotal experience, I genuinely believe my mental hyperactivity is probably the biggest contributor to the excessive burning of calories.

I can’t seem to find any other explanation to answer how and why I seem to burn so many calories with ease.

With that said, I do have to work on structuring how best to manage this unique energy expenditure patterns, to avoid burning out.

Final Thoughts:

Feel free to share your own experiences with ADHD and energy levels.

I’d like to emphasise that these are just my anecdotal experiences, more scientific research needs to be conducted on this topic. There needs to be more concrete studies to explore the metabolic impact of ADHD symptoms.

The ADHD Professional.

Disclaimer: I am not your psychiatrist, coach, doctor. Neurodivergent Diaries does not provide medical services or professional counselling and is not a substitute for professional medical care. Everything I publish represents my opinions, experience, not advice.