Cleaning is a workout. Vacuum for an hour and you’ll burn 238
calories. Scrub down the bathroom for 30 minutes and 200
calories will melt away, says the
IndyStar.
So it may seem obvious, but a new study has found that doing less housework will make you more likely to pick up weight.
On the converse, you should do housework to stay slim, says
iAfrica.
Because housewives of today are lazier and burn up to 360 calories less a day than housewives of 50 years ago.
The reason? More technology and less actual physical effort to get the house clean, so you spend less time ‘exercising’ to do so.
Less time doing housework means you’ll burn fewer calories…
So while you’d easily spend up to 26 hours a week cleaning your house in the 1960s, in 2010 this had dropped to an average of just 13.3 hours per week on housework.
That’s half the time!
Great for efficiency, not so great for your health.
But you don’t have to do all the washing by hand to experience the health benefits of exercise.
In fact, you get similar results to exercise just from making a simply change to your diet.
Get all the health benefits of exercise from curry!
That’s right.
Health Bytes reports that while nothing can really ever replace
exercise, there is a natural compound that offers some of the
health benefits of
exercise without the strain or sweat - well, maybe some of the sweat.
It’s called curcumin, and is extracted from turmeric, a spice commonly used in Indian dishes, especially curries.
The results of an eight week study showed that taking 25mg of curcumin per day were the same as you'd expect from a two-month exercise workout programme!
So if you really can’t be bothered to do more exercise in the time you save on housework, at least add more turmeric to your food.