How Many Burpees Does a Snickers Cost?
Ah, Halloween. The holiday when fitness influencers, coaches, and gyms like to remind us how many burpees a bite-size Snickers will “cost”.
But that’s not a game you and I are playing this year—or ever again for that matter.
Because thinking about your food in terms of needing to “earn” it (by exercising in advance), or “burn” it (by doing exercise afterward), is a recipe for an unhealthy relationship with food.
And this year, I’m determined to keep as many people as possible from spiraling down that hole.
Here’s why the “earn it or burn it” mindset around food and exercise doesn’t work:
The estimates of how many calories you burn from exercise, even from your favorite fitness tracker, range from mildly to wildly inaccurate. In addition, it’s FAR easier to add calories to your daily total by eating them than it is to burn them.
But most importantly, no matter what the calories in/calories out equation looks like…
You do NOT need to earn or burn your food.
You can have a healthy relationship with both food and exercise, and it starts with:
Using food to nourish and care for your body, as an expression of self-love.
Using exercise to nourish and care for your body, as an expression of self-love.
You deserve to eat food that you enjoy, and there’s nothing you need to do to earn or justify it.
By thinking that you need to move more to offset any candy you eat, you’re making eating conditional...which often leads to feelings of guilt, shame, unworthiness, and other uncomfortable emotions. Not only will you feel worse, but those difficult emotions often fuel overeating.
Similarly, by thinking that you need to exercise in advance to earn sweets (or any meal), you’re telling yourself that you’re not worthy of eating that food for the sake of it.
All of these different cues work to erode your sense of trust, control, and peace around food...leading to obsessive tracking, sneaking food, emotional eating, binge eating, yo-yo dieting, and more.
Here are the only two things you need to remember this year:
You deserve to eat candy or other foods you enjoy—more than one piece, if you want—simply because you like how it tastes.
You deserve to move your body in ways that you enjoy, without counting the calories you burn or associating it with food.
Now, you might be worried that if you give yourself this unconditional permission to eat, you might go overboard. And that’s a valid concern. You may in fact eat more than you initially intended to once you start.
However, what I invite you to consider is this:
What if putting restrictions and conditions on the food you eat is actually triggering further overeating? (I can pretty much guarantee you that it is.)
That’s why in Food Body Self® coaching, we work to remove those unhealthy external restrictions while creating a new set of healthy internal boundaries around food—ones that come from a place of love and care.
When you make that shift, you’ll no longer have to worry about going overboard when you release those external restrictions, because you’ll have a new set of internal boundaries in place—ones that help you feel more authentic, deliberate, and peaceful.
And when you’re making more authentic decisions around food, you’ll be able to focus on more important things, like what your Halloween costume will be.