Junk food is delicious, but it didn’t get its name for no reason. Candy, chips, and everything in between is full of sugar and fat, which means if we don’t burn it off quickly we run the risk of gaining weight. How do you determine just how much exercise you need to burn off your favorite sweets? The team at BritLab figured this out for us.

According to the team, the easiest way to figure out exactly (or close to it) how much exercise burns off calories, you can use a program known as the Compendium of Physical Activities. This is an online list of activities and how many calories they help to burn. It uses an equation called the MET, metabolic equivalent of task, to figure out how many calories are burned a minute.

Read: Obesity In America Comes From Inactivity, Not Too Many Calories

Calories are units of energy in our food, and even the most “healthy” foods have some amount of calories. We need this energy to do daily tasks, but if we do not use the energy in our day, it gets stored as fat for later use. The problem, according to BritLab, is that we're extremely bad at understanding how many calories we consume in a day, and as a result, we have trouble calculating how much exercise we need daily to burn them off.

Don't worry too much about the exact number of calories. According to BritLab, balancing an active lifestyle with a healthy diet leaves enough room for the odd chocolate bar here and then. Just make sure you try and keep it in check.

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