She begged me for days. And I flat out refused.
“10,000 calories, are you insane!?” The thought made me shudder. Of course, my brain immediately went into the math calculations.
My daughter, Alysha, had found a YouTube Video of the Hodge Twins in where they documented an entire day’s worth of eating that totaled around 10,000 calories. She was searching to see if any women had attempted the challenge and at that time (this happened about 6 months ago) there weren’t ANY!
So naturally, she decided we needed to make a splash on YouTube and do it.
Because I already knew that 3,500 calories is equal to 1 pound, it would be safe to say that we’d be tacking on an additional 4-5 pounds.
Then (because my mind just naturally went there) I started trying to configure how much exercise it would take to “un-do” an excessive 10,000 calorie gorge fest. Considering that the “average” 130 pound woman burns approximately 509 calories per HOUR running at a 6.0 mph pace, you can imagine how quickly I was adding up those minutes.
And, you know that I wouldn’t be choosing running as my method to fry off those 10,000 calories (just check out the shirt I was wearing during this video).
Now, I’m 1000% AGAINST women getting into the cycle of “If I eat this, I just need to do xyz amount of exercise to burn it off” or, worse yet, wearing a heart rate monitor in attempt to exercise those calories away. I’ve lived in that perpetual cycle and it can make you crazy.
It is a vicious cycle to get into and it’s a very dangerous place to be. You never win and it can lead to exercise and eating disorders.
I just wanted to provide some simple math for you to understand how impactful 10,000 calories can be.
Don’t worry, no excessive cardio or starvation diet was done after the filming of this video to make up for the massive amounts of food we consumed. That’s not my bag…
It took a few days of convincing from my daughter, but I felt like it would be a great opportunity to teach women how mindless eating quickly adds up.
I was also curious as to what could I learn from this experience and documenting it via video.
How could I make it educational for my audience (with some humor) and also provide alternatives to foods and restaurants that a lot of women (and men) eat at?
So I said yes to my crazy daughter and she started mapping out our 10,000 calorie challenge attack so we could make some killer recipes at the end of it all.
We started mid-afternoon and here’s the damage we did:
Velvet Grill and Creamery- Pancakes, bacon for me, and French toast and bacon for her
Mr. T’s Donut Shop- Cronut, donuts, and several donut holes for me and donuts and donut holes for her
In and Out Burger- Animal Style Fries (on their “secret” menu) for each of us. No, we didn’t share!
Freebirds World Burrito-Monster Burrito, chips and a Pot Brownie for me. Monster Burrito, chips and a cookie for her
Mountain Mikes Pizza-Several slices of all-meat pizza and some breadsticks for both of us
Ice Cream Company- Ice Cream Sundae for me and multiple scoops of ice cream for her
Click to watch the video above…(you may have to start the video at the beginning, for some reason it’s not cooperating and playing mid way through).
With rough calculations after the video (I was a little under the influence of a carb coma) we estimated that we each ate near 11,000 calories or more.
Crazy, right?
It was SO much fun and I leafed a lot. I also had a massive gut ache and realized I could eat much more food that I thought was humanly possible.
Enjoy the video above and make sure to sign up for my newsletter where I will be releasing all of the recipes that I recreated from this epic day of eats (and we’ve got some accompanying videos for those too).