Exercise is a Gigantic Waste of Time
The same fat guy walks by my house every morning and again every evening. He wears the same orange, foil spacesuit workout kind of garb every day; the thing must smell like bloody hell. Can you put clothes made of foil in the washer? In the last few months his wife has started to join in on the festivities though I only see her in the morning. They drag a mangy dog along with them on their walks. He doesn’t have a spacesuit but looks like he’s seen better days.
I noticed the other day that this guy, for all of his efforts, has been wearing the same orange NASA suit since he came to my attention more than a year ago. My point being that this guy has not lost a freaking ounce since he started all of this exercise frivolity. He’s still gasping for air. Still has the knees that bend in like fat people get. Still dragging around the same mangy dog. The wife is still there and I think she may be even bigger. What is the point of all of this?
I see a lot of fat people running around my neighborhood and they don’t ever get any smaller and then after a while I don’t see them anymore. A new round of rotund people replaces them. I suppose there is the possibility that the dropouts died but I don’t think so. My personal feeling is that they just woke the eff up and quit spending what little time they have to themselves and went back to the couch, television and junk food that made them so happy for all those years. Back to where they should have stayed in the first place.
I used to run. I used to run fifty plus miles a week. Of course this was twenty years ago but still, I used to be a runner. I could run like nobody’s business. Like Forrest Gump. On Saturdays I would do ten miles plus with ease. But I hated every second of it and quitting it took more gumption than getting off smokes. Trust me, I’ve quit smoking at least a thousand times. I know what it takes. It’s an addiction and what’s worse, I gained a ton of weight over my time as a jogger.
So if none of these people are losing any weight and I actually gained weight, why bother? I can’t get hurt sitting on the couch watching television but people who work out are tearing themselves apart for what?
I looked up freakish sports related injuries and a few of them stand out to me as some of the worst things that could ever happen to someone on a self-induced basis. For instance, Men’s Fitness says that a torn pectoral muscle is one of the Top 5 worst things you could ever do to yourself. It is literally your chest muscle ripping itself off of the connecting muscle in your arm as a result of lifting too much weight. The fine people at Men’s Fitness do offer advice on how to prevent such a catastrophe, and I quote, “only work with a load you can control.” Oh, thanks. Sounds like advice better saved for woman in a sex advice column in Cosmopolitan.
Plantar Fasciitis, also known as jogger’s heel, is another gem where the tendons in your foot actually start to rip to shreds. Charming. I had plantar fasciitis a few years ago but mine was brought on by being twenty-five pounds overweight not from running around the neighborhood like a hipster douche, beard blowing in the wind and hell bent on proving he’s better than everybody else because he runs. I basically did nothing but sit and eat to get this disorder. Meanwhile some dumbass tortured himself for his share of the fasciitis. Who’s smarter? In case you’re stumped, the answer is me by a longshot.
Over the course of a normal day of eating, exercise is virtually meaningless. Take a look at some of these comparisons.
I base these hopeless activities on thirty minute increments as anyone who has an hour to devote to straight exercise is a giant douche and probably needs to start a family or drive for Uber. I’m also going with a standard 180 pound human being for my example as well. The first case is walking three miles per hour for thirty minutes. This gigantic waste of time burns a grand total of 135 calories. Wow! Let me tell you what else equals 135 calories. One decent beer, one. Half of a glazed donut. A half a donut has 130 calories. I guess you could go nuts and eat the whole thing but then you’d have to walk around like a jackass for another thirty minutes. You could eat two of those tiny Snickers things and that would add up to 130 or so calories. Is eating two of those stupid things worth punishing yourself for a half an hour? The answer is a resounding, no.
On the flipside, you could eat two heads of iceberg lettuce and stay under 135 calories. Yum. Vegetables are the worst things ever created. I have a theory that there weren’t vegetables until Adam and Eve sinned, they are a part of God’s curse on man.
Of course there are other calorie burning activities which carry much more bang for the buck. Tai Chi burns upwards of 170 calories per half hour but there is the added cost of looking like a total asshole while you do it. My friend’s neighbor used to do his tai chi routine on his front lawn every morning and could not have looked like a bigger dick. This guy was pretty well built but he lived with his tobacco spitting mom and they would yell at each other the whole time he was getting his chi on. To me tai chi is a mental art as well as physical one but the whole thing is kind of ruined when your toothless mom is shaming you for looking like a total nad in front of the neighbors.
I looked on the list for an activity that I might be able to embrace. Bird watching actually burns a hundred calories per 30 minutes invested. Pretty sure that means that I burn one hundred calories just by sitting down so I’m into that one. Gutter cleaning cuts two hundred calories per 30 minutes. I’m required to perform this task, no choice, so I guess I’m in for gutter cleaning. Only problem is I only do it once a year so I’ll probably need to fill in around the edges a bit. Taking out the trash burns 120 calories but I don’t think I could stretch this activity out for an actual thirty minutes unless I was an actual garbage man. No, I think I’ll just sit in my chair.
Pushing a kid around in a stroller burns 120 calories but pushing a plane, like a real airplane, burns 250. Who sat down and figured out the calorie burn of moving an airplane anyway? Who is pushing an airplane anyway? This is an activity usually reserved for a guy like Superman. Doesn’t it seem like pushing an airplane should burn just a few more calories than shoving around crib midget in a stroller? Just sayin’.
Take a look at this poor sap. I despise motivational memes. I especially dislike the wines memes but the ones used for motivation are pathetic.
“We need encouragers?” No, what we need is somebody to tell this poor bastard that he or she is seriously wasting their time. Since cycling at a modest rate of 10 MPH, and let’s face it, this lump is going to be lucky to break the speed necessary to just stay up, at 10 MPH a person will burn about 200 calories. What are the odds that taking 200 calories off the top of what this person ingests in an average day is going to put even a scratch into that frame? Zilch.
I didn’t realize until the other day that my iPhone has an app built into called, “Health.” What’s more, I didn’t realize that it was “on.” Astoundingly, when I opened the app I found that I am actually walking over a mile and a half on average every day! Now, I don’t walk. I don’t run. I sit at work all day and sit when I get home in the evening. All of this is a prelude to getting into bed and sleeping for 8 hours. Where is this mile and a half coming from? Like almost 3000 steps a day? Most of it on the weekdays. And then it dawned on me. I smoke, and all of this activity is coming from walking back and forth to the smoking pit in back of the building at work and firing up a heater every hour and a half. At home on the weekends I don’t have to do anything but go out on the deck to throw down some heat. Quitting smoking would single-handedly strip me of the only activity this body has. And here I was thinking of quitting for the 1001st time.
JP Shaver Says.... 