Muscles

The typical male human is 40% muscle by weight.  That pencils out to 80 pounds of muscle on a 200 pound man.  A 10 pound gain in muscle is a 12% gain in total muscle mass and it takes a typical man five months, at two pounds a month, to add that 10 pounds of muscle.

At rest, a pound of muscle burns 6 Calories a day.  An additional ten pounds of muscle burns an additional 60 Calories a day.  This belies the conventional wisdom that muscle mass added by exercising greatly increases one's basal metabolic rate. 

Some authors quote numbers as high as 50 Calories per day, almost ten times greater than the amount that was actually measured.  Other fail to look at units and quote numbers like 15 Calories/pound, failing to account for the fact that nearly all scientific literature is published in metric...15 Calories/kg is NOT the same thing as 15 Calories/pound.

A full sized Snickers candy bar has 240 Calories.  Ergo, working out for five months will allow the dieter to eat an extra 1/4 Snickers bar a day.  This number does not comprehend any exercise the dieter might continue to do.  It merely accounts for the at-rest effect of the additional muscle mass.

If Oreo cookies are your huckleberry, they have 160 Calories per cookie.  That noodles out to about a 1/3 of an Oreo cookie per day.  You can eat the middle one day, one wafer the next and the other wafer on the third day.

Red wine your poison?  It has about 25 Calories per ounce, so you can toss down an extra two ounces a day.

So what parts of the body demonstrate the highest energy consumption-per-pound?

• 200 Calories/pound......Heart and kidneys
• 110 Calories/pound......Brain
• 90 Calories/pound.......Liver

The conclusions are inescapable:  Love more, drink more, think more.