Eating should be enjoyable!

A new study has just revealed that diners who ordered from restaurant menus listing the amount of exercise required to work off each dish were less likely to overeat.

Just how much exercise will this cheeseburger cost me?

I’m struggling with this one. Though I’m sure well-intended, this feels like the start of a slippery slope.

Let me start by saying that I am a huge proponent of the FDA push to have as many restaurants as possible display nutritional content (would love for them to go so far as listing the ingredients, too) on menus. We deserve to know what we’re putting into our bodies and those of our families. And displaying it reinforces its importance, making us wiser and more curious consumers. I’d also imagine it makes the restaurant itself think twice about what it’s selling: do we feel okay about what this label says or should we perhaps re-think this recipe? (Though maybe that last one is just wishful thinking on my part.)

But telling people how much they have to exercise to work off the food they’re about to buy? Obesity is a growing epidemic we absolutely need to fight, but I fear with tactics like these, we have a better chance of breeding a new generation of anorexics and bulemics than we do of reducing obesity rates.

First off, this line of thinking seems to rely on a previously believed but now highly refuted claim that calories in = calories out. In fact, it’s not the quantity, but the quality of calories that matters.

Think quality over quantity when it comes to calories

And this sort of effort would do nothing to further consumer education about quality.

Secondly, a good rule of thumb is that maintaining (even losing!) weight is 80% about the food we eat, and only 20% about the exercise. An effort like this would mislead folks into thinking that exercise can make up for a bad diet. Sure, it’s better than not exercising, but it won’t cancel out bad eating habits.

Thirdly, I question how accurate this exercise information could possibly be. Age, gender, weight, height, genetics, etc. Certainly my 30 minutes of walking can’t have the same effect on me as the dude’s down the street has on him?

Fourthly (is that a word?), two hours of brisk walking for a cheeseburger? For most, this seems so unachievable that it risks backfiring. Why bother worrying about it at all when you can’t come close to satisfying the recommendation?

Lastly, isn’t food – and the ritual that surrounds it – supposed to be enjoyable? Picture this. I’ve just worked a really long week. It’s Friday night. I’m just excited to be going out to dinner with my husband and my kids, whom it feels like I haven’t seen for more than a combined hour this week. I want to know how my husband’s big meeting went, how my daughter’s school play is coming along, and what new experiment my son did in science class. But before I find any of that out, I open the menu to see that I’ll have to walk for over three hours tonight if I want to eat anything in the restaurant. And just like that, the mental health benefits I was getting from finally sitting and enjoying time with the people I love most were compromised.

An extreme example? Perhaps. But you can picture it, right?

I decided to become a health coach when I read that we’re the first generation in U.S. history whose children won’t live as long as we do. Unhealthy living will be the culprit. So you don’t have to convince me that food and exercise are incredibly important. But there are ways to encourage better habits, and ways to discourage them. And pairing exercise regimes with menu items feels pretty discouraging to me.