First you load your plate with turkey, mashed potatoes and stuffing. Squeeze some of Aunt Linda’s famous green bean casserole on the side, and any extra space gets the cranberry sauce. Don’t forget to top it all with gravy! The pies will be waiting for you when you finish your first plate!
Sound familiar? It’s that time of year! With the holiday season right around the corner, we are all looking forward to delicious meals, generous desserts and relaxed diets. Well, some of us got to wondering how many calories we consume at a typical Thanksgiving meal – Are you ready for this? The Calorie Control Council estimates upwards of 3,000 calories in just one meal, putting you well above the recommended, 2,000 calorie per day intake for the average adult. We thought it would be fun to give our readers an idea of what it would take to burn all 3,000 of those Thanksgiving calories:
Go for a walk with your family and friends
The average adult walks at about 2.5 mph during a leisurely post-meal stroll. At this pace it takes 24 minutes to walk 1 mile, in which you burn about 40 calories. If you’re hoping to burn off your turkey dinner this way, you would need to stroll for over 75 miles. If you pick up the pace to a brisk 4 mph walk, you would decrease your mile time to 15 minutes! At this rate, in order to burn 3000 calories, you would need to walk only 50 miles!
Turkey Trot 5k
You might find yourself celebrating Turkey Day with people who enjoy exercising over the holiday season! Take a page from their book and register for a local 5k running race! At a 10 mph pace, you could burn 411 calories during the race, meaning you would still need to run the race at least 7 times to get anywhere close to burning off your meal!
Dancing
My family is into music, so we like to get into the swing and dance those extra calories off! If you moderately elevate your heart rate by shaking your groove thang, you can burn 480 calories in an hour. However, you’re going to have to really commit to a dance marathon, seeing as it would take 6.25 hours to burn 3,000 calories!
Jumping jacks in one football game
Finally, we know that Thanksgiving Day isn’t complete without watching the game! If you find yourself lounging after your Thanksgiving meal, utilize the commercial breaks as opportunities to burn off some of those calories you just enjoyed. Over the course of an average NFL game, there are about 64 minutes of commercials and at least 20 commercial breaks. Jumping jacks are a great way to burn some calories in those quick 1-minute breaks. If you’re pushing yourself, you could burn over 700 calories throughout the entirety of those commercials! However, you’d have to watch more than four football games to burn off the entirety of those calories! Alternatively, it would take about 6,000 jumping jacks to burn off all 3,000 calories. That boils down to about 95 jumping jacks per minute of commercial break. Better get jumping!
Now you know a few fun ways to deal with the extra calories you’ll be enjoying over the next few months. We hope that you all have a great holiday season and hope that you keep these tips in mind when you go back for your third plate of Grandpa Joe’s pumpkin pie!