Get cleaning, ladies and stop turning into porky fatties (smoking and sex work too)
GET cleaning ladies: it’s because you’re porky fatties. And rather than this being the usual misogynist tripe this is actually sound science. There is a real reason for muffin tops and gargantuan bingo wings: it’s that no one is cleaning behind the stove properly any more. Really:
Women, they found, once had been quite physically active around the house, spending, in 1965, an average of 25.7 hours a week cleaning, cooking and doing laundry. Those activities, whatever their social freight, required the expenditure of considerable energy. (The authors did not include child care time in their calculations, since the women’s diary entries related to child care were inconsistent and often overlapped those of other activities.) In general at that time, working women devoted somewhat fewer hours to housework, while those not employed outside the home spent more.
Forty-five years later, in 2010, things had changed dramatically. By then, the time-use diaries showed, women were spending an average of 13.3 hours per week on housework.
And it’s fairly simple to then do the rest of the maths. This reduction in housework results in the burning of some 360 calories per day less. Further, 3,500 calories not burnt means 1 lb of fat. Which leads us to something like 40 lbs a year of weight gain among those who are still eating like it’s 1965 but cleaning like it’s 2013.
And yes, 40 lbs (or, horrors, two year’s worth of this) is indeed enough to turn one from svelte and trim (and a “healthy” BMI of 25 or so) into a porky lardbucket.
Men suffer from much the same problem of course: much less of “work work” is now physical labour so fewer calories are being expended. And food has also become very much cheaper of the decades compounding that weight problem.
But for the laydeez the solution is obvious. Throw away that vacuum cleaner, that washing machine and back to the mangle and dustpan and brush. Although there could be another method of keeping the men happy I guess, other than being textbook svelte and trim. Might we not be able to find a more enjoyable method of getting housemaid’s knee?
PS – or why not try smoking?
Posted: 1st, March 2013 | In: Reviews, The Consumer Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
