When your eyes open wide as you are listening to something you're either getting an extraordinary deal or you're having a hard time believing what you just heard.
"You can lose 300 calories just by laughing for 15 minutes." Two different people told me this same story in one day. 300 calories seemed a lot. If this was true I could finally eat all the pizza I ever wanted. It was time to verify this street rumor by going on the internet.
It's true, you can burn calories by laughing out loud. Dr. Maciey Buchowski, of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, claims that he is able to measure how much energy it takes to laugh by studying volunteers in a metabolic chamber.
The metabolic chamber is a sealed room where scientists can measure physical body energy expenditures as well as the heart rate of those laughing. Dr. Buchowski believes he and his colleagues are the first to measure how much energy it takes to laugh.
Dr. Buchowski and his group also found out that laughing increases the metabolic rate by 20% and that laughing out loud for 15 minutes burns up to 20 - 40 calories.
Not the pizza gorging promise I was envisioning but enough to justify eating a brownie and laughing it off.
The longest laughter of the volunteers in the experiment was 40 seconds in a minute.
Typically the longest recommended duration of laughter in a laughter club is around 10 minutes after half-an-hour of laughter warm-ups. That's at least fifteen times longer than a laugh caused by seeing something funny.
For more info about the original article go to the MS-NBC news web page: www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8092720
As much as the desire to share laughter with others is what brings people to a laughter club, it is the after effects that are important to notice.
When the laughter ends, the physical, creative and emotional sensations continue. Participants find themselves being very insightful during this time period. If possible people should take time to express themselves with others in the room.
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