Losing weight is a very painful process for most obese people. Resisting the temptation of delicious food and insisting on boring exercise has little effect in the end.
The fact is that only scientific weight loss methods can lead to healthy weight loss. These weight loss methods rely on physical methods to burn calories to achieve weight loss.
Can those methods maybe include playing chess? Can we also achieve weight loss through another method of consuming calories?
While studies have shown that the brain can burn a huge amount of calories when thinking, especially long or deep thinking, the things are not black and white.
In this article, we’ll explain everything about chess and burning calories and debunk some common myths.
Introduction – How World Chess Championship Was Canceled
In 1984, the World Chess Championship was abruptly canceled because the Russian elite player Anatoly Karpov, who was competing for the championship at the time, suddenly lost weight.
According to reports, in the previous five months and dozens of games, Anatoly Karpov lost 10 kilograms. His physical condition has not allowed him to carry out such a high-intensity “brain fight,” and the World Chess Championship was forced to cancel.
But more than the cancellation of the World Chess Championship, it is the mystery of his “weight loss” over the past few months that has caused more concern.
In fact, Karpov was not the only one to suffer from this extreme physical effect.
Although no chess player has reportedly lost such a significant amount of weight since then, most players have lost more or less weight during the tournament.
The scientists allegedly studied the phenomenon and found that top chess players can burn up to 6000 calories in a day, without leaving their seats, simply by their hard “thinking.”
But is that really true? If it isn’t, how do we explain why Karpov became too thin to play?
Scientists generally agree that this is mostly down to stress and reduced food consumption rather than mental exhaustion.
Good chess players are under tremendous stress, leading to increased heart rate, breathing, and sweating. Combined, these effects burn calories over time.
Additionally, elite players sometimes have to sit for 8 hours at a time, disrupting their normal eating patterns. Energy loss is also something stage performers and musicians may experience because they are often under high pressure and disrupt their eating schedules.
How Chess Burns Calories
If thinking consumes such a large amount of energy, does it mean that playing chess (thinking hard) is a shortcut to losing weight?
To delve deeper into this question, we first need to understand how much energy a normal human brain consumes playing chess.
Studies have shown that when playing chest, with body not engaged in any activities other than basic breathing, digestion, and keeping warm, our brain will consume about 20% to 25% of the total body energy at this time. Of course, most of which is glucose.
That is, for the average woman and man, the average energy consumed by the brain per day is 350 and 450 calories, respectively.
Research also shows that brain drain is even more dreadful during childhood.
According to research by Doug Boyer, associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, the brain can use up more than 60 percent of the body’s energy in a 5- to a 6-year-old child, which is mind-boggling.
Consumption makes the brain the most energy-consuming organ in the body, but interestingly it only accounts for 2% of the total body weight.
Chess & Hungry Brain
Why is the brain so “hungry” when playing chess?
Scientists explained that most of the energy absorbed by the human body is used to make the neurons in the brain communicate through chemical signals transmitted by neuron synapses. A lot of energy is used to activate synapses.
This process involves a large number of ions transmembrane.
Transporting ions across the cell membrane is one of the reasons the brain uses a lot of energy when playing chess.
Also, the brain is never really at rest, and when we sleep, it still needs fuel to keep signaling between cells to keep our bodies functioning.
What’s more, serving the brain is a multitude of cells that exist to deliver nutrients to neurons. These cells also need their own glucose to survive and keep working.
That’s why, during our intense developmental years of five or six, we use almost three times as much energy to build our brains as the adult brain needs.
Chess Doesn’t Burn that Many Calories
That 6000 kcal we mentioned seems to be a common myth in the chess world. We don’t think it’s ok to let it go just like that without fact-checking.
This ESPN piece is the number one origin of the deception, and every time it comes up, some scientists argue it, and other bedroom scientists come up with pseudo-science to try and confirm it.
Sapolsky has never publicized any research that can back up his “6000-7000” calories a day number and concludes this based exclusively on examining chess players’ heart rates and blood pressures during the game.
You don’t need to be an exercise physiologist to comprehend how heart rate variability does not directly correlate with energy expenditure. You are not burning as many kcals while having a panic attack as you are while playing basketball.
Real exercise scientists have utilized indirect calorimetry – the research standard in exercise physiology for energy expenditure – to actually calculate how many calories chess players burn while playing chess.
Troubat et. al in 2008 discovered that chess players burned an average of 1.53kcal per minute at rest and a maximum of 1.67kcal per minute while playing chess – a modest 10% increase over doing nothing. 10% is a long way from the 300 percent claimed by Sapolsky.
Even if we use the top-end of the confidence interval for calorie expenditure, an 8-hour chess game will only result in 960kcals spent, which is only a few hundred calories more than if you were just sitting watching TV.
Rodoplu et al. presented their own research at the 9th international scientific conference of kinesiology, finding that chess players burned 138 kcals on average in a 30-minute chess game, compared to 260 kcals in a 30-minute run.
In chess, there are a lot of studies on HRV, but there aren’t as many on energy expenditure (as indirect calorimetry is resource expensive)
Some will argue that the players in these studies are not top grandmasters or that they are not competing in serious classical tournaments. While this is true, I believe it would be difficult for you to come up with an additional 4000 calories by saying, “but a top tournament is more stressful.”
You should ignore the 6000-calorie claim until someone publishes some evidence to back it up because all evidence so far suggests that calorie expenditure during chess play is only a minor increase over rest.
Can You Lose Weight By Playing Chess?
Since the brain is a huge energy drain, does this mean that the more we use this organ, the more energy it absorbs and the more calories we burn? That is to say, can it achieve the effect of losing weight?
Technically, the answer is yes. But what has considered “difficult” thinking is different between different individuals.
In short, people think differently, so the boundaries of what they consider “difficult thinking” are also different.
Professionally speaking, thinking is difficult when the brain cannot easily solve problems using previously learned procedures or tasks that continually change situations.
For example, when you learn something new, your brain adapts to increase energy transfer in any brain area activated by the training.
Over time, as we become more proficient at a particular task, the brain doesn’t have to work as hard to do it, so it will require less energy to complete the task.
But in a fierce chess game, where almost every move of the chess player requires breakthrough innovation, things are a bit different, right? Well, no. It is believed that the overall energy supply of the brain is constant.
When performing difficult cognitive tasks, there may be a large expenditure of energy in local areas of the brain. Still, when it comes to the overall energy operation of the whole brain, these activities will not cause a large expenditure of energy.
Sadly, playing chess alone doesn’t make us slim. Keeping your body busy for long periods is very energy-intensive. You may lose weight if you can’t eat as often or as much as you normally would!
