Ever wonder what your drunken trip to Burger King or Friday afternoon treat at McDonald’s was costing you in calories? Or what you might have to do to work those bad boys off?
US health website HomeRemedyShop.com is on a mission to show us just how many calories we’re racking up from our lunchtime Subway and cheeky packet of chips after work. The website allows you to put in foods from seven different fast food outlets including Burger King, Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Subway, Taco Bell and Wendy’s. Add your body weight and it will calculate what you’d have to do to burn it off.
For example, we put in a weight of 13 stone 6 pounds (188lbs), which is the national average weight according to the Office of National Statistics. Our fast food meal consisted of a double cheeseburger, large fries, a chocolate milkshake and six chicken McNuggets, which came to a total of 1,790 calories.
The website then uses the following formula to work out how much time and energy you’d need to burn off every single one of those calories: Calories = METS (calories/kg*hours) x Weight (kg) x Time (hours). The site explains “In the above equation, the energy cost of a given activity is represented by the constant “METS,” which denotes the activity’s “metabolic equivalent.” To find the hours of activity needed to equate with the caloric intake during a night out, we rearranged the above equation to solve for hours: Time = Calories/(MET x Weight).”
The calculator then generates a set of statistics on how much exercise you would have to do to burn off those naughty nuggets. For our 1790 calorie meal, we would have to do five and a half hours of walking, three and a half hours roller blading, or seven hours of yoga to shift those excess cals.
For the same calories, you could also eat 447.5 spears of asparagus, 59.7 cucumbers or 71.6 medium tomatoes, according to HomeRemedyShop.
So there you have it, next time you go for a cheeky McDonald’s, think of all the cucumbers you could be eating for the same number of calories.
