Sometimes people talk about calories in terms of how much exercise it would take to burn them off. There has even been talk of putting the amount of exercise needed to burn the calories on menus. I think this is a red herring, because it might lead people to believe that you have to exercise enough to burn off all the calories you consume.
This isn't the case. A lot of calories (probably even the majority of our caloric intake) are burned by our baseline metabolism and the activity of everyday life. When I had my dysphagia incident a couple of summers ago, I was being as sedentary as possible to preserve what precious few calories I was able to consume. I didn't exercise at all, I took elevators and escalators instead of stairs, I took the subway to the next stop instead of walking. Despite that, I still lost about a pound a day because of the calories burned in the course of everyday life.
I'm concerned that if you present food to ignorant people in terms of hours of exercise to do, they might think that in order to be healthy, they have to go out and jog for three hours to burn off their dinner. Then they might feel the need to exercise the point of unsafeness, or to eat unhealthily little, or otherwise deliberately exercise off a greater percentage of their caloric intake than necessary and thereby not leave enough for everyday life. (And, of course, non-ignorant people can calculate how much they need to work out for themselves.)
1 comment:
You are exactly right. It's called exercise bulimia, a commonly hidden form of eating disorder. So much material I see on diet and exercise is practically begging people to develop it.
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