Oh, Halloween.
In addition to ghosts and ghouls at Halloween, there’s an awful lot of anxiety about candy, about having candy in our houses, about eating candy, and mostly about gaining weight. Scary.
For me, given the number of fitness communities I run in, it means my social media newsfeed is full of a lot of memes about trading off candy for workouts. How long do you have to run to burn off that mini-Snickers and so on?
Like this one,
Halloween candy calories and the workout equivalent!#HumpDayHealthTips #GoodLife #Halloween2017 #candy #workoutmotivation pic.twitter.com/5CAZ0nUyQY
— Good Life PT (@goodlifegr) October 25, 2017
And here’s the burpee version. Because of course there’s a burpee version.
I’m here to ask you not to do it. I mean, eat the candy, don’t eat the candy, I don’t care. But don’t think of it as a candy exercise trade-off.
You see we’re not against big, ridiculous amounts of burpees. We’ve done various burpee challenges over the years. Right now, a small subset of the bloggers is doing a squat challenge and I think they (or maybe it’s just Nicole left standing, I mean squatting) are up to 165 squats a day. Not me. I tapped out when I started to worry about hurting my knees and then I got the flu so that ended that.
But it’s the exercise as the thing you do to burn off calories and avoid getting fat that bugs me. Why? See The benefits of exercise are many, but long term weight loss isn’t (necessarily) one of them. I like it better when it’s phrased as food as fuel, rather than exercise as punishment, but even then I’m leery.
Just eat the candy. Just do the squats and the burpees. Or just do one or the other. But I would like the memes that link the two out of my newsfeed, I think.
