No, You Can't Lose Weight By Farting, You Lazy Monster

Let’s be real: everyone loves to fart and hates to exercise. That’s why so many of us were excited by the recent news that farting could potentially make you lose weight! “I fart all day,” we all thought, “I could be a size two by Christmas.” Too bad it was all a beautiful shit-smelling lie.

Death and Taxes reports that the farting fad blew up recently when a post from 2012 (by one of those Facebook fact pages that are notoriously wrong) started making the rounds of the internet again, probably because everyone wanted a quick way to lose weight before the new year. Even Google got in on it, suggesting that farting burns 67 calories per one flavor explosion. That means that if one farts ten times in one day, they’d be burning 670 calories. Fart twenty times and you could basically discount anything you ate! Considering that an average human farts 14 times per day already, a couple of extras wouldn’t be difficult! Best. Diet. Ever.

TOO BAD IT’S ALL BULLSHIT AND NOTHING IS REAL!

Apparently, so many people believed in the beautiful lie that Snopes had to step in and set the record straight, thereby ending a farting epidemic that threatened to escape the borders of San Francisco and take over the world. This is what you need to know about farting as a means of cardio via Fat Loss School:

Some people get a bit desperate when it comes to weight loss. They start wondering which of their daily activities burns enough calories to warrant increasing the frequency. We get questions about calorie consumption in a host of different scenarios. But perhaps the strangest question posed to date is: how many calories do you burn by farting?

If you take a moment to think about this, the answer is rather obvious: none! When you fart, your muscles relax and the gas pressure in your bowels do all the work in expelling the gas. The only way you would achieve a measureable figure in the calories burned farting is if you really strained yourself to the limit.

Hopefully this information will end any post-thanksgiving “exercising” people plan on doing before they start. But just in case, you should probably print that quote and show it to your family before any of them just start expelling fecal particles all over each other at the dinner table.

Image via Shutterstock (which has no better fart images even though I’ve tweeted them about this several times.)