Mmmm... Cheese.

As I wrote in my Good Thing He's a Cartoon post a while back, you can throw a bunch of food combinations into WolframAlpha and it will crunch the numbers and give you a dietary summary much like you see on the sides of any packaged food product. For example, if you get snacky in the middle of the night and decide to have 1 bag of Skittles, 5 apples, 4 beers, a head of lettuce, 14 slices of wheat toast, and 167 grapes it will make some assumptions and print out what you see on the left (click to enlarge).

As you can see it just gives you the facts. It doesn't judge you... unlike some software I could name.

But, hey! Aside from the fact it appears you are trying to kill yourself via Vitamin A poisoning and that you are all but guaranteed to wear out your toilet plunger the next day you are going to need to work off all those calories. But how? Luckily, WolframAlpha is there to help with that, too.

Go ahead and type in “climbing stairs”. You are brought to a screen where you can figure out how much time you would need to spend on a StairMaster (or similar) to exercise your guilt away. Sticking with the defaults and the midnight snack described above it looks like you would burn 589 calories per hour, so you would need to spend the better part of four hours sweating your binge off.

Piece of cake. (1 piece of cake = 239 calories = 24 more minutes on the StairMaster, btw).

“But I don't have easy access to a StairMaster,” you whine. No problem. You can put in the direction as both ascending and descending so get on over to your stairs and get to work. Unfortunately, you need to work an extra 45 minutes to make all those calories go away (to quote Remo Williams: “Down is easy.”)

“I live in a one-story ranch,” you whine some more. Fine. Just scroll down a bit and voila! You find some equivalent activities that don't require any stairs at all. But, before we do that, let's make your midnight indulgence a little easier on the imagination and on the colon. Let's say you eat a block (8 ounces) of cheddar cheese and wash it down with two medium-sized glasses of red wine...

What? Don't look at me like that... Oh, like you've never done it... If you're so damn perfect why were you up half the night eating lettuce and Skittles, then?

Anyway, when I scroll down a bit (your screen will be different) I see that a person can trade their toil on the stairs for arguably more pleasurable “sweeping outdoors”. Unfortunately, it takes 1 hour and 41 minutes of sweeping to do the equivalent work as one hour up and down the stairs so you will need to set aside about five and a quarter hours to get rid of the wine and cheese.

You might ask through your cheese-filled pie-hole: “Umm, there is no way I am going to spend that much time sweeping – old curling injury, you understand. Aren't there any other suggested activities that don't involve stair climbing or scrubbing the bejeezus out of my sidewalk, my driveway, and the cul-de-sac out front?”

Sure. Just reload the page and you are given the same data but with three new activities. Here are some (apparently real) options and the time it will take to burn off 1,529 calories worth of cheese and wine:

• 4 hours and 14 minutes caulking a log cabin
• 4 hours and 42 minutes of Greek dancing
• 5 hours and 17 minutes working in a bakery (or marching in a marching band or playing the drums)
• 2 hours and 0 minutes swimming the butterfly
• 9 hours and 12 minutes bookbinding
• 2 hours and 38 minutes of working in a steel mill
• 8 hours and 28 minutes bird watching (precisely twice as long as log cabin caulking... really?)

Considering you didn't have the wherewithal to even find a flight of stairs and your log cabin is as caulked as its gonna get, it's likely none of the above choices are realistic options for you.

It's probably just best to lay off the cheese.