Laughter Can be an Effective Part of Weight Loss
By Teresa Ambord
Want to burn some calories without doing stomach crunches or jogging at dawn? Try turning on your favorite comedy.
Contrary to the popular belief that fat people are jolly (a myth that might have begun with Jolly Old Saint Nick himself) people who do a lot of laughing may be indulging in exercise. Laughter has been credited with many health benefits, including stress reduction, lower blood pressure, increased energy, better breathing, and a greater ability to fight disease. And it reduces harmful hormones and increases beneficial ones. Now some medical and psychiatric researchers also believe that hearty laughter also burns calories.
When you think about it… it makes sense. Have you ever laughed so long and hard that your stomach muscles or your sides hurt? That’s because, as psychiatrist Dr. William Fry put it, “a belly laugh is internal jogging.” Good, hard laughter involves 15 facial muscles plus dozens of others all over your body that flex and relax.
Laughter opens up the blood vessels (22 percent over blood vessels at rest) causing the blood to flow more easily, which explains why blood pressure is lowered. Stress, on the other hand, constricts blood flow up to 35 percent (that’s a total swing of 57 percent between a stressed out person and a person who is laughing!) With figures like that, you can see why stress takes a physical toll on your body.
Also when you laugh, your pulse and respiration increase, adding oxygen to your blood. That means you expel more carbon dioxide. In one study, participants were seated in a special room that tracks metabolic rates (by measuring the change in the level of carbon dioxide). Then they were shown an episode of the Cosby Show. Based on that study, the people who laughed a lot burned 20 to 30 percent more calories.
Other studies show that people who indulge in a lot of good, hard laughter undergo bodily changes similar to those experienced by those who exercise moderately. In fact, one researcher says that a good laugh 100 to 200 times a day is like spending 10 minutes rowing. Who knows… maybe the day will comes when doctors will tell patients to eat right, exercise regularly, and watch a good comedy everyday.
If this isn’t enough to convince you, there’s more. Stress induces the body to produce more cortisol. Cortisol is a hormone which causes us to crave food. So a by-product of stress-relieving laughter is that we produce less cortisol, therefore are less likely to crave food.
After hearing about laughter therapy on a TV program, one woman took it to the next level. Katie Namrevo had been self-medicating her depression with candy and other goodies, as many of us do. She determined that instead of reaching for the refrigerator to feel better, she’d make herself laugh by recalling some funny incident from the past. She made a point of laughing from 30 seconds to five minutes, whenever she wanted a snack.
It took awhile, but eventually she laughed off 35 pounds. Obviously, the weight loss was due to a combination of factors, but Namrevo sees them as interrelated. She changed her diet by laughing instead of snacking. And the laughter also gave her more energy (no doubt from better blood flow, reduced stress, improved breathing… etc). The energy was what she needed to exercise more. It’s a happily vicious circle.
To spread the word, Namrevo developed a program called Laughtercise, which combines exercising with a CD laugh track of raucous laughter that is contagious. In addition, she has written a book called Laugh it Off! Weight Loss for the Fun of It.
Learning to laugh a lot instead of reaching for junk foods or succumbing to stress can only have good results. The side effects are all good, and trying it is free.
