Calories way easier to eat than burn off
Anyway, I've been preaching the benefits of exercising and about my new multisport hobby so much — even to the point of trying to convert, er, convince others to "tri" 'em — that some might wonder if I've been called on a triathlon mission.
FYI, I haven't.
For the record, if somebody wants to extend such a calling and the destination is Kona, Hawaii, I just might do it — preferably not in a suit and tie.
Though I've become sold on exercising in general (who'da thunk it?), I relearned a valuable lesson this past week regarding physical activity and weight loss.
Moving your body is great and all, but the scale sometimes just doesn't care how much you exercise and how much weight you think you should have lost if your mouth also keeps moving in a munching motion.
Sadly, calories are harder to sweat off than to swallow.
It's almost an unfair equation, really. Consider this comparison: A single serving of one of my favorite candies, Reese's pieces, has 200 calories, but my 220-pound body would have to run/jog/waddle like E.T. about 1.4 miles to burn that much fat fuel, caloriesperhour.com claims.
But getting my short, chunky body to travel 1.4 miles on its own power would take about 16 minutes of running. Maybe 15:30 if I pretended an Olympic gold medal or 50 more Reese's pieces were on the line.
By my calculations, that means it is approximately 640 times easier to gain weight than to lose it. And if you think about it, running 1.4 miles would only offset the handful of candy. And who can stop with just one handful anyway? So now you've got the multiplying effect of several handfuls. Plus, once you've eaten that much candy, who even feels like running?
That makes gaining weight infinitely easier than losing weight by just exercising. Especially if you put pi in the formula.
I re-realized this when I stepped onto the scale Monday. The chart on my bathroom wall kindly showed that I'd lost four pounds the previous month, which included me training for and doing two sprint triathlons.
But after just five days of vacation — where I left work, the world and my will power behind — the mean bathroom scale unkindly showed that I'd regained all four of those pounds. Boom! Welcome back!
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