I read recently that laughing heartily for 15 minutes can burn as many as 40 calories. Over the course of a year daily laughter can add up to the loss of four pounds for the average person. So I guess it is true – you can laugh your ass off.
I wasn’t aware that laughter had weight loss benefits, but I have long understood it’s benefit to mental, emotional, and physical health. Not that I needed that info to promulgate laughter in my world. Laughter has long been my number one life medication and if ever there was a laughter addict – well, I’m it.
I am very happy to learn that my laughter can have the added benefit of weight loss. I must admit though – I wonder if the researchers who calculated the calorie burn in relation to laughter thought about the fact that laughing people tend not to be eating at the same time as they are laughing. That could account for perhaps some additional weight loss. Of course you could try and eat, but one good guffaw could result in you spraying food across the room – which would only likely result in more laughter and hence more weight loss. What a great system!
I thought about the 40 calories burned during 15 minutes of hearty laughter the other day when my son Noah and I were discussing Mike’s knee medication. I was explaining to Noah that one was a generic type of Aleve and the other was a generic Valium or something. After a bit I realized that I was wrong – it was a generic Vicodin – so I noted to Noah that at least I got the first letter right – those “V” medicines are all the same to someone like me who has virtually zero pain medication savvy. That is when Noah started ribbing me about other “V” medications that were “all the same” – Viagra, Vagisil, etc. He thought that someone with a J.D. and a Ph.D. should be able to distinguish between the “V” medicines. Tis’ true – I should probably be beyond the Sesame Street level of medication identification – I couldn’t deny Noah’s point. And my goodness, how I laughed at my stupidity on that one. It struck me as endlessly funny that in my medication frame Mike could be taking generic Vagisil for his knee – after all, all the “V” meds are close if not the same, right?
Yes sir, a “V” medication for Mike and a 40 calorie burn for me…now if I had actually given him generic Vagisil thinking it was the same – well then, that calorie burn would have been in the hundreds! 
Day nine hundred and fifty-two of the new forty – obla di obla da
Ms. C
