Do you need to do burpees for every fry you consume? Dietitian Lucy Carey explains why you should not earn your food with exercise.

We called it the ‘Exercise Park’. It was just a big field with a playground and some exercise machines.

I don’t know if this is like, a Kiwi thing perhaps? But it’s not uncommon for there to be these outdoor exercise machines in parks. There’s usually a ski walker thing, and a cycle one, and some bars to do pulls up on and things like that. They’re always way too big for the kids to play on them properly and I have never seen an adult use them in my life (unless they are playing with their progeny). Regardless, they’re dotted all around the city I live in.

My then 3-year-old and I would often stop at the Exercise Park on our way home from preschool, so that we could have a good laugh as he attempted the machines.

But there was something written on every single machine that always annoyed me. I tried not to look at it but I swear it exuded an invisible fish hook that latched on to my eyes and dragged my gaze towards it.

Every machine said something along the lines of, “30 mins = one hamburger”, complete with little illustrations to show that if you worked out on the machine for a certain length of time, that would burn the calorie equivalent to a hamburger.

Now, why does that annoy so much? I’m so glad you asked.

Firstly, it’s not true. Calories are exceptionally fickle. Do you know how they figure out how many calories are in a food? They literally burn the food in a lab and test how much the water around the food increases in heat. While this is very clever and all, everybody’s body is so vastly different that I don’t think it’s very relevant to real life. We all ‘burn’ our calories differently, and the make-up of the calories will have an impact too, and our hormone levels and our muscle mass, etc. 100 kcal to you may not really be the same thing as 100 kcal to me.

Secondly, and most importantly, the 30 mins for a hamburger thing, sends the wrong message completely. It’s anti-food and it’s kind of anti-exercise, too, because it’s not promoting exercise for all the wonderful things exercise does (looking after our mental health, helping regulate emotions, keeping us fit and strong and able to be independent, etc.).

It’s implying that the reason you should exercise is to either lose weight, or so that you can ‘earn’ yourself calories.

And I whole-heartedly disagree.

You don’t earn food with exercise.

Food is not provisional on how much you move your body. How much you move your body may affect your appetite, sure, but doing a barre class in the morning doesn’t mean you are now entitled to a latte and muffin. The latte and muffin should be about the pleasure of it, about spending time with your barre class friends, about enjoying a mindful morning tea and some me-time. Just as the barre class shouldn’t be about how many calories it burns. It should be about the fun of it, the benefits you know you get from it and how it makes you feel afterwards. The two are mutually exclusive. If the only reason you’re exercising is so you can eat food, well, honestly that’s disordered thinking that plays right into the hands of diet culture.

Exercise. Eat. One is not determined by the other.

The next time we hit the Exercise Park, we’ll play on the machines for sure. He might even be big enough to be able to reach some of the things now. It’ll be a heap of fun! And if we feel like it, we might even stop for a treat on the way home. That’ll be fun, too. But the treat won’t be dependent on the exercise.