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Choccy full? This is what you need to do to burn off a chocolate Easter egg

Small and dark chocolate eggs are better for you.

Small and dark chocolate eggs are better for you. Photo: Getty

Chocolate, chocolate, chocolate. All these damn eggs littering the kitchen bench, ornamenting the fruit bowl, being worn as earrings and decorating the soap dish in the bathroom.

There’s only one thing to do to regain your sanity and your floor space: eat as many of your Easter eggs as quickly as you can.

Now the place looks tidier … but what have you done? Given yourself a crash course in diabetes? Filled your veins full of sweet mud?

What to do now?

Dr Dominique Condo is senior lecturer in sports nutrition at Deakin University and accredited sports dietitian at Geelong Cats FC.

The New Daily asked Dr Condo to calculate how much exercise we’d need to do to burn off one of those little solid eggs that look so pretty and harmless – like fairy tale treasure! – when pooled together in a bowl.

This will actually differ from person to person.

Dr Condo, in her job, works with a measurement scale called ‘metabolic equivalents’. And burning off calories is determined by what’s known as the metabolic equivalent of task (MET) which “essentially takes into consideration how much energy we burn at rest”.

For example: one MET is the amount of energy used while sitting on the couch and vagueing out.

Reading may use about 1.3 METs while running may use 8-9 METs.

The there’s the matter of energy to be burnt

“Just one of those little eggs has got 138 kilojoules,” said Dr Condo.

“And if you think on about average how much exercise you’d need to do to burn that off, it would be the equivalent of three or four minutes intense running.”

And if you’re not a runner … or even a trotter? “A good half hour walk on average is what it would take,” she said.

“But how many of us eat the one egg? We’d tend to have more than that?”

Dr Condo confessed that she’s likely to have three or four in one session … or two hours worth of walking!

What about those golden bunnies?

“I don’t know how realistic it is for someone to consume a whole bunny,” she said.

“But if you ate the whole bunny, you’ve just eaten 2500 kilojoules.”

Dr Condo said a whole bunny is actually six servings. “If you eat the whole thing that means you need to do one and a half hours of high impact exercise, an aerobic workout.”

And walking? There goes a good part of the day.

Even so, Dr Condo isn’t one to talk about a walk of chocolate shame.

“An important point to make is that a part of Easter, like any celebration, is to enjoy with friends and family some of these foods you wouldn’t normally have,” she said.

“If you eat a bit more of these foods on a few days over the Easter, it’s not going to have any direct correlation with any weight gain.”

On the other hand, she said: “The key message is that anything in excess is not going to be great for us. The issue is that we tend to over-indulge and that over-indulgence can last a few days, a week, when we have all chocolate around the house.”

So just eat it all in one go, right?

“Ah … no,” she said.

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