We woke to a smattering of snow yesterday morning so stayed in a bed a little longer to read. Handsome Hubby is reading
The Organized Brain by Daniel J. Levitin (he likes his reading light and fluffy!) and shared these wonderful snippets from the book:
- 1 hour of daydreaming uses 11 calories
- 1 hour of reading uses 45 calories
- 1 hour attending an academic lecture uses 64 calories (though I slept through most of mine)
Wow! Makes you wonder how many calories 1 hour of writing burns up? In the name of research I noted the number of pages I could read in 1 hour: 45. That's 1 calorie per page. Now I think publishers and bookshops are missing a trick here. Why don't they put helpful stickers on books showing the calorie usage? This could help to sell the bigger books i.e. Hilary Mantel's
Wolf Hall at 650 pages would burn up 650 calories - more if you read faster than me.
I also calculated I needed to read for 5 solid hours to burn off the consumption of this plateful of Co-op brownie bites. Actually, yesterday I made have achieved that ...
Here's another fact from hubby's fascinating book: the only cells in a woman's body that are fuelled solely by glucose are brain cells. Interestingly, for men it's brain cells and cells of the testes that need only glucose for energy ... I'm not making any comment here merely repeating the facts ...
Very interesting! All that thinking about our characters, plot, etc plus doing washing, ironing, cooking etc must help to burn up even more calories
ReplyDeleteGood thinking, Paula. I just like the idea of burning calories while sitting on my writer's bottom and reading :)
DeleteLOL! I can well believe that. I was always ravenous during uni revision times and thought it was just my body doing diversion tactics to avoid more revision. I wondered about getting the book myself. :O)
ReplyDeleteHubby is enjoying the book, Madeleine, but the author is a neuroscientist and at times goes into a lot of biological detail as well.
DeleteI love this diet - if I could match the incoming calories with the outgoing. Only problem it's easy to stuff down more than 45 calories during an hour's reading.!
ReplyDeleteThat is the problem, Lindsay!
DeleteHow about if we turn the page in a flambouyantly theatrical manner? Surely that'dburn more? (And help us get a seat to ourself on public transport)
ReplyDeleteI guess you could also combine reading with treadmill or exercise bike, Patsy.
DeleteAh, if only we could read away our pastries. I fear there's more to it than that. If you like useless facts, I seem to remember reading that we need 330 calories a day just to breathe and pump blood.
ReplyDeleteYou are absolutely right, Julia, about how much we use just existing. This was my little bit of fun. But still it all counts :)
DeleteWell I like that kind of diet, Tracy! And how interesting about the brain cells...
ReplyDeleteMade me laugh, Rosemary :)
DeleteIt'll help me to be skinny ))) But no kidding, I noticed that after hard lessons I lost over 200-300g. Brain is the most energy-intensive organ in humans body.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely, Sophie. Thanks for dropping in :)
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