How Many Calories Does Kissing Burn? Here's The Research

Kissing can be a lot of things—quick, slow, passionate, awkward—but did you know kissing also burns calories? No, a makeout session won't torch anywhere near the number of calories you'd shed during a HIIT workout, but kissing does do the body good, in more ways than one.

A casual kiss involving little more than lip action will burn only 2 to 3 calories per minute, according to a 2013 report1 on philematology (aka the scientific study of kissing—yes, there's a word for it!) penned by American cardiologist Joseph S. Alpert, M.D., in the American Journal of Medicine. For the record, that's not much more than what you'd burn sitting stationary on the couch (sitting burns about 1.3 calories per minute2). That said, Alpert estimates more intense kissing might burn up to 26 calories per minute.

How many calories your kiss will burn depends on a variety of factors: how long the kissing lasts, if you're sitting or standing during the kiss, using your hands, the type of kiss, how old you are, how much you weigh, and more. There's no one universal way of kissing, so it's almost impossible to determine a definitive number of calories burned per peck, casual kiss, or passionate makeout session—but that hasn't stopped experts from taking an educated guess. Here are a few estimates of how many calories you burn from different types of kissing.

"Simple kisses use as few as two muscles and burn only 2 to 3 calories," writes Alpert. This is because if you're keeping your kiss PG—think a quick peck before heading out the door or a casual smooch—your muscles aren't getting much of a workout.

"What else you do alongside kissing makes a big difference," holistic nutritionist Rachel Fiske, N.C., CPT-NASM, tells mbg. "If you're getting hot and heavy, using your hands and moving your body a lot, the caloric burn is dramatically increased. Just like with other forms of exercise, standing and involving multiple muscle groups boosts calorie burn."

If your makeouts look like they do in the movies—dramatically picking each other up, pressing each other against walls, and the like, while smooching—you might find yourself getting a decent workout in the process! To compare with some perhaps comparable activities: Both ballroom dancing and wrestling burn about 6 calories a minute.

That said, according to a review4 published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the exact number of calories burned during sex fluctuates depending on the intensity level of the activity, the individual's body weight, and how long the sex lasts.

Looking at the act of oral sex, in particular, personal trainer Brooke Marrone told Cosmopolitan that going down on your partner for an hour equates to 100 calories burned. Granted, that's a lot of tongue and cheek but still worth noting should you have the time (and desire).

"Oxygen consumption is very important to burning calories, [and] if you're breathing heavy, your heart needs to beat faster to make sure it's spreading fresh oxygenated blood to your muscles, and brain," says Hickey. "This causes your body to burn calories in order to match the energy levels your body is requiring."

Kissing in all its wonderfully different forms can burn various amounts of calories. However, as enjoyable as kissing can be, the activity doesn't offer the same health benefits as, say, running on a treadmill or sweating through a Bikram yoga class. Still, while you may not lean out or tone up from kissing, there's no denying the many other health benefits of kissing.