COLUMN: MURDER plan promises results
I hate exercising. There, I said it.
I always hated in high school how my gym and health teachers would talk about how good it felt to exercise. They must all be crazy masochists, because when I exercise, all I feel is pain. Putting my body under unnecessary exertion sure doesn’t give me the “warm fuzzies” they all bragged about.
A wise friend of mine has a philosophy about life that I like to apply to exercising: If it hurts, don’t do it. So I don’t.
Sure there’s the occasional day where some strange internal instinct comes alive inside and gives me the urge to run. I try to stifle those temptations the moment they start, but I’m sad to say I’ve succumbed and willingly run on my own accord. Fortunately, these urges only come about as often as the urge to try the stunts on “Fear Factor.” Again, I’m sad to say that’s too often.
Since I hate exercise so much, but don’t like feeling gross and extremely overweight, I’ve been desperately looking for a solution to my dilemma. After an exhaustive research study of half an hour, I’ve come up with an exercise plan that is right for everyone. I call it the Mr. Un-Athletic Rundown Delights Everyone Regularly (MURDER) plan.
This MURDER plan focuses on using everyday activities to burn calories. Health people and nutritionists make burning calories sound as difficult as building the pyramids, but it doesn’t have to be like that.
Calories are units of energy that the body needs to function. Most people need about 2,000 or 2,500 calories a day to function. If a person takes in more calories through food than it needs, it is stored as fat. On the flip side, if a person takes in fewer calories than the body needs, the body’s excess fat is burned to make up for the lack of energy. Therefore, if you can burn more calories than you take in, weight loss can occur.
Now what would it be like to burn calories by merely sitting at your computer typing a paper instead of spending hours at the gym? That would be a dream come true, right? This is where the MURDER plan really takes off. The MURDER plan utilizes daily activities to burn calories.
A simple calorie-burning calculator on Prevention.com, a women’s health magazine, has been a key component in the development of the MURDER plan. This calculator takes a simple task, analyzes how much time it takes you to do it and takes into account your weight, and then calculates how many calories will be burned.
For example, every morning I wake up and spend about a minute making my bed. In this simple routine, I burn 2.93 calories. Not bad for a simple daily activity.
Another daily activity that burns calories is washing dishes. This takes quite a while in my apartment since my roommates have yet to learn the principle that cleanliness is next to godliness. I figure on average I spend 15 minutes doing my roommates’ dishes. By cleaning dishes, not only is my kitchen now clean, but I’ve also burned 49.71 calories. Wow! That sure beats five minutes of light exercise, which only burns 32.44 calories.
Now, you might be thinking, “Wait, five minutes of light exercise burns almost as much as 15 minutes of doing dishes. That doesn’t sound like a good deal.” And that’s where you’re wrong. Honestly, who has time in their busy college schedule to dedicate time to exercising? I certainly don’t. With the MURDER plan, I burn calories by doing things I normally do, thereby killing two birds with one stone.
Sure, these exercises don’t tone the body or get it in shape, but I don’t have time for that. My goal is to keep off my sophomore 15, if at all possible. Even though the MURDER plan is convenient, it doesn’t quite match up to the health and calorie-burning power of running or walking.
Consider this though. On a given day, I estimate I walk about an hour. This hour of light walking amounts to a whopping 259.14 calories burned. Not bad for something I have to do anyway, since I don’t have a car.
The MURDER plan is all about taking your tight time schedule and turning it into something productive and beneficial. Now you don’t have to worry about exercising for hours on end to burn calories. Simply go to Prevention.com, use the calculator to figure out your daily activities and calculate the calories you will burn doing the things you have to. Then estimate how many calories you take in on a daily basis. Chances are if you eat fairly decently, you’re burning a good amount of calories doing your daily routine.
The beauty of the MURDER schedule is there is no feeling guilty, no painful exercises, no getting sweaty and no costly gym membership. It’s just living life to the fullest. The best part of all is, as I sit in the office tonight assembling the sports page, I will burn 777.32 calories. With calories being burned like that, I can eat my Sour Patch gummies without feeling the least bit of shame.
Seth Hawkins is a sophomore majoring in public relations. You can sign up for the MURDER plan by e-mailing him at sethhawkins@cc.usu.edu