Burn an extra 840 calories a week without doing more exercise? Yes — and you can get it without a pill or potion or crazy exercise machine, either. This kind of calorie burning can be yours if you just hit the “off” button. Two recent studies prove that simply turning off your TV is a seriously powerful pounds-off strategy.
The average American and Canadian is glued to the tube for about five hours a day. A steady diet of “Entertainment Tonight” and sitcom reruns — or even the History Channel — can turn you into a teletubby by essentially putting your body’s ability to burn calories on pause. In a new University of Vermont study, 20 people agreed to cut their daily TV viewing in half, to 2 1/2 hours. In their newfound free time, they paid bills, read books or played board games with the kids. Some vacuumed, dusted, walked the dog; others signed up for yoga classes. Here’s the amazing part: Regardless of how they used their non-TV hours, they burned an average of 120 more calories per day than a control group that kept on watching for five hours a day.
