Does sneezing burn calories?

Normally I talk about food calories and the various ways that it is possible to burn them off, but today I thought I would do a quick post on something that is seasonally related.

While sat watching the television last night I noticed an advert for pollen allergy relief during one of the numerous commercial breaks. Now the first thing I thought when this came on was how early it is, especially considering here in the UK it is ridiculously cold for the time of year we are at. However, what I also wondered was how many calories do you burn sneezing? I had an appointment with my GP today, for something totally unrelated to sneezing, but while there I had to ask the question considering the answers I found online were pretty inconclusive.

So does sneezing burn calories according to a qualified physician? The answer is yes it does, but of course not many. It is not as if you can spend allergy season in a field in order to sneeze yourself silly, hoping that you are going to end up slimmed down by the time winter comes round again. Nor is it going to be a particularly good idea to sit and hope sniffing black pepper in order to force your body into sneezing fits.

In reality you maybe burn a couple of calories each time you sneeze, hardly a huge amount, and this could be slightly more for a larger person, and slightly less for a smaller one. But I guess if you are one of the many people who do get hit hard over allergy season, then this may actually do you a little good as far as getting rid of a few extra calories go.

As somebody who doesn't suffer from any form of pollen allergy there is no real test that I can take in order to find this out. But I would be interested to hear roughly how many times people sneeze on an average day when allergy season kicks in, as you can then get a rough idea of sneezes per week and how many calories you may actually be burning by this involuntary action.

Thinking over it myself, I can see it being realistic that somebody with some form of pollen allergy could sneeze a couple of hundred times a day, that's nearly 1,500 sneezes a week, multiply that by two and you have sneezed away nearly 3,000 calories. I really can't say how accurate that is, but if it is possible then surely those wanting to lose weight could do a lot worse than suffer from something like ragweed allergy every summer and fall. As Tesco say, 'every little helps'.

So sneezing does burn calories, how many is uncertain and you certainly won't find a calculator online asking for your age and weight etc.. in order to determine calories burned per sneeze for you, more is the pity.

If you do suffer from any form of pollen allergy such as ragweed allergy, why not check out another site I have on how to deal with this.