I am like Superman, by day I work as an anonymous copywriter, you might have seen some of my work and will never know. By night, I am a vibrant advocate of weight loss! Scouring the internet, trying to dispel weight loss myths, call people upon bad (or just ridiculous) “advice “, and generally try to make the internet a more interesting place.
Unfortunately, for me, last week the company I work for moved offices. It is only a few extra miles on top of my journey, but I now spend an hour a day driving. This frustrates me for two reasons
I love driving but when I spend an hour a day driving, I do feel as though my time could be better spent...
- Petrol now costs 105.9 English pennies per litre of unleaded fuel. This is £1.06 to everyone else. Therefore it now costs £50 for me to fill the tank of my little Corsa. This makes me sad.
- The traffic is awful in the mornings so driving to work takes up an hour or more of my precious time.
If you’re really trying hard to lose weight, this is time wasted.
Or is it?
I drive around in this little purple corsa. Sure, she is a bit old and I need to adjust the clutch tomorrow as the gears won’t go in but she is called Vivienne and she is my baby. If I were to make a lot of money, I would probably tidy her up a bit but I’d make sure I’d get some decent mileage out of her, I’d never sell her unless I really had to. Anyway, in the car I sing for pretty much the whole journey and I couldn’t help but wonder: Does singing burn off calories?
I did a quick search on Google and the results pointed towards singing and waving your arms in church. Now, I am not a believer in any religion and I don’t wish to enter into a debate about my lack of religious belief here. Although I am happy to clarify that Richard Dawkins really helped me clarify my non-beliefs.
Anyway, after much searching, the general consensus appears to be that you burn off 4 calories a minute singing. This is 240 calories an hour. I expect this is if you belt songs out as opposed to shyly humming.
I wouldn’t replace singing for the gym or anything, but for burning a few extra calories when you really can’t do much else, plug in your ipod and pretend you’re Whitney Houston or Pink in the car! I’ve been singing in my car since I passed my driving test back in 2004 and I’ve come to enjoy the weird looks from bemused drivers. I suppose people seeing me (a young woman singing in a car covered in flowers) would think I am weird but I couldn’t care less! Belt out your favourite songs!
