ABC News/Mara SchiavocampoBy MARA SCHIAVOCAMPO
ABC News’ Mara Schiavocampo shared her experiences after spending a day inside a metabolic chamber at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s Hospital in New York City. Schiavocampo’s journey, which aired on “Good Morning America,” was the first time that TV cameras were allowed to peek into a metabolic chamber, which is used to monitor your total energy expenditure and better understand how your body uses energy in everyday tasks such as resting, eating and exercising.
Three weeks ago I spent an entire day inside a vacuum-sealed metabolic chamber at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s Hospital in New York; 23-hours trapped inside a room the size of a prison cell. Why? It’s the most cutting edge way to measure how your body burns calories, and just might provide a glimpse into the future of weight management. The room has previously only been available for research purposes, and I’m one of the first people to ever use it commercially.
After analyzing the data for weeks, I finally got the results. As someone who spends a lot of time reading about health and wellness, I wasn’t expecting to learn much. Instead, I was shocked by the results. Here’s what I learned about the way I burn energy:
1. For me, good ole fashioned cardio beats high intensity interval training (HIIT)
High Intensity Interval Training, or HIIT, is one of the hottest new fitness trends. This is a training method where high intensity intervals are followed by brief periods of rest. For example, you might sprint for one minute, then walk for a minute, and repeat this cycle for 30 minutes. It’s widely believed to be one of the most efficient ways of exercising, burning more calories in less time. The chamber found that I burned more calories during a moderate steady run (10.7 per minute) than during a HIIT workout (7 calories per minute). Of course this isn’t a conclusive finding about HIIT’s effectiveness, but it surprised me because I felt like I was working much harder during HIIT.
2. After burn? Not so much
After burn is a phenomenon where your body continues burning calories at an elevated level after you’ve completed a workout. I always thought I was burning higher levels of calories for hours, even days, after an intense workout. Not so much. The chamber found that my body returned to pre-exercise calorie burning levels within 15-minutes of completing my workout. Bummer.
3. Carbs burn fast
The one thing that didn’t surprise me was seeing just how quickly my body burned through carbs. To test this, I spent six hours in a different, smaller chamber, and ate a high carb breakfast of a muffin and sugary coffee drink. My body torched those 750 calories in four hours, compared to the estimated six hours it would have taken to burn off a high-protein meal. This confirmed what most of us know instinctively; protein keeps you full longer.
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