- A new study claims obesity rates could be reduced if food items were labelled with the amount of exercise you would need to do to burn them off, but this is a seriously bad idea.
- For starters, how many calories you burn during a workout varies a lot depending on the person and how hard you exert yourself.
- Moreover, this would reinforce the damaging mindset that exercise is solely about “reversing” food consumption.
- We should be encouraging people to exercise for the many benefits it offers, rather than it being seen as punishment for eating.
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It’s that time of year again: The season for telling people how many calories they’re going to inhale in their festive celebrations – and the “workout equivalent” needed to “offset” what we’ve all consumed.
And this year, the cheery message has been reinforced by a new study by Loughborough University in the UK, which claims that people would make healthier choices if foods were labelled with the amount of physical activity needed to burn off the number of calories in them.
This is a terrible idea, and not what we should be doing if we want people to develop healthier approaches to nutrition and exercise.
Not only is it impossible to give a fixed number for how many calories you burn doing a particular exercise, this whole concept reinforces the incorrect (but widely held) views both that exercise is simply about counteracting food consumption, and that we should feel guilty for eating.
How many calories you burn varies wildly from person to person
The study, published in the British Medical Journal, claims that the current nutritional info on food packaging and menus is poorly understood, and so these proposed labels would help combat the obesity epidemic.
The researchers claim people would consume as many as 100 fewer calories per meal, but they admit that their analysis took place in laboratories and not in real-life situations such as restaurants or supermarkets.
They give the example of eating 229 calories in a small bar of milk chocolate, which they say would require about 42 minutes of walking or 22 minutes of running to burn off.
But herein lies the first problem: How many calories you burn varies wildly - and I really mean wildly - from person to person.
Your basal metabolic rate (AKA how many calories you burn) depends on your body size, muscle mass, genetics, gender, age, and other factors.
The bigger you are, the more calories you'll burn. The more muscle you have, the higher your basal metabolic rate will be, so the more calories you'll burn.
What's more, a 2018 study found that our metabolic rates even vary at different times of the day.
Sure, maybe the labels will simply give figures for an average person, but what does an average person even look like these days?
Calorie-burn also depends on how hard you work
And then there's the fact that how many calories you burn in a workout is based on how hard you exert yourself.
When it comes to the 42-minute walk and the 22-minute run, calorie burn could again vary massively depending on how fast you're going. There's a big difference between a sprint and a leisurely trot, after all.
I track my calorie-burn on my Fitbit every time I work out.
While I know this may not be absolutely accurate, it still shows me how much the figure changes based on how hard I push myself, even when doing the same workout for the same amount of time.
The main issue is how this could change people's mindset towards exercise
My main gripe with this whole concept is that it reinforces the damaging mindset that so many people already hold: That exercise is about "offsetting" food.
Sports nutritionist Scott Baptie summed it up well when he described the idea as "daft."
"Food doesn't need to be earned, food is more than just calories, we need calories to sustain life, we all burn calories at different rates, it assumes people are able to do exercise, it can lead to unhealthy associations with food," he wrote on Instagram.
The truth is that physical activity, moving in some way, should be something we want to do because we enjoy both the feeling of dancing, lifting weights, playing football, or whatever it might be, and how we feel afterwards.
If you haven't found an exercise you actually love yet, you probably just haven't tried enough different types, because there will be at least one.
For so long, I thought I wasn't really an exercise person. I always thought people were lying when they said they looked forward to working out.
Then I found the types of movement I genuinely love doing and crave if I have a few days off, and everything changed. Working out became a joy - one that just happened to have tons of health (and aesthetic) benefits.
We as humans are designed to move, and it is so good for both our bodies and minds. Exercise simply is not about burning off food.
Food labels enforce the idea that we should feel 'bad' for eating
Food guilt is a massive issue that so many of us experience.
Society makes us feel bad for indulging and enjoying foods that we know aren't the most nourishing, but that often just leads to restriction followed by bingeing.
If we could eat a doughnut without feeling guilty afterwards, or like we need to go and burn it off, we'd be better at eating in moderation.
Registered dietitian Rachael Hartley agrees with me. "If someone doesn't have time or money to prepare a meal, if all they have access to is a bag of chips, I want them to have access to healthier food choices," she told Insider's Gabby Landsverk.
"I don't want them to have to eat an extra side of guilt and shame."
Exercise should be something we do to celebrate our bodies, not to punish ourselves for eating.
This isn't the way to teach people about energy balance
I'm all for educating people about nutrition, energy balance, and how to make healthy choices - I've written before about how calorie-counting can help you develop a healthier relationship with food.
But labelling food in this way reinforces the damaging mindset that food has to be "burned off" or the damage "reversed," and also that the point of exercise is simply counteracting food consumption.
What's more, it's an entirely flawed concept, as calorie-burn varies so much.
Yes, weight management is about energy balance. Yes, we have an obesity epidemic. And obesity rates are likely to go down if people are better educated about how to create an energy deficit.
But this is not the way to do it.
Read more:
How calorie-counting actually helped me develop a healthier relationship with food