Tips, tricks, and health myths are everywhere, and it’s so easy to buy into what you see and read—especially when a purported health expert is spouting the news. Often, the tips make weight loss or healthy living seem as easy as a few minutes of exercise or the quick addition of latest super-food to your lunch. But let’s face it, drinking a mug of fat burning green tea won’t negate the fat packing power of the cake you serve with it.
UNDERESTIMATING HOW MUCH YOU EAT AND OVERESTIMATING HOW MUCH YOU EXERCISE IS A HUGE PITFALL.
Unless you work at the top of the Empire State Building, taking the stairs (while awesome) is NOT exercise. Parking your car at the back of the lot and walking to the front of the grocery store, will NOT get your heart rate up. Pushing the vacuum around the house is a great way to keep your floors clean, but it won’t push down those numbers on the scale. Chewing gum, fidgeting, hot chili peppers, drinking more water, vigorously scrubbing down a bathroom are all fabulous, but alone are not enough.
Let’s break it down a little further…
You burn 2-3 calories climbing a typical flight of stairs, and that walk from the back of the parking lot to the front of the store will help you torch a mere 6 calories.
Vigorous Vacuuming for 10 minutes will help you fire off 37. Chew that gum for 1 hour to shed a grand total of 11 calories, and a mug of green tea will burn 16 calories in a 24 hour span
To put this in perspective, a typical Starbucks drink is 150 Calories. That mid afternoon muffin has about 430 calories, and a typical meal at Olive Garden will set you back roughly 900. So even if you climbed the stairs, parked at the back of the lot, vacuumed the house, chewed gum and drank mugs of green tea all day, it won’t even pay for your cappuccino.
Here’s the bottom line. It’s about LIFESTYLE. It’s about adopting a lifestyle of purposeful eating and committing to fitness. It’s something you need to do each and every day. Lesson of the day: Don’t underestimate how much you eat and overestimate how much you exercise.
