Calories

So an average Canadian is 1.48 metres tall with a BMI of 25.
So that person is 57 Kilos.
And needs to lose... 4 kilos.
Alright, so our average Canadian needs to burn... 30,836 calories.

This overweightness is estimated to cost us, um, holy crap, 4,300,000,000. There are 30,000,000 average canadians, so, that's um, 143$ a person.

Dang, that's not much money.

Now, how can we burn 30,000 calories?

I'm going to take cycling as activity #1. Cycling burns 450 calories an hour, so after 66 hours of cycling, calories are burned. One more hour of cycling once a week in the summer over 3 years.

Example #2 is more interesting: 234 hours of climbing stairs. Say you go to work, and you take the elevator up one floor. If you walk the stairs, in and out, 5 days a week, that's, um, 10 trips, 30 seconds each trip, 10 minutes a week, 520 minutes a year which is 8.6 hours, you'll burn all those calories in... 27 years.

Damn.  I though we could afford and justify this:

EDIT: Ok, so that's 30,000 calories per person, 30,000,000 of us, that's, um, 900,000,000,000 calories, at a cost of $4,300,000,000, so that's 900,000 to $4,300, so 9,000 to $43 (round up for easy math to $45), so it's 1,000 calories need to burned at a cost of $5, or 200 calories burned for a dollar. Every dollar we spend on fitness programming needs to burn more than 200 calories. Huh

Sports and Arts

So a wise woman of my acquaintance postulates the sports and arts have a similarly beneficial effect on your community.

If sports teams provide the same kind of benefit, do they provide them in the same way?

It's good to have an arts scene. It encourages artistic endeavour in community members, it encourages people from afar to come to your community to participate in the arts world, and it challenges, in extreme cases, the community to express itself against repression or intolerance.. Ok, let's do a google for "athletes call for..."
Alright, sports passed that test...

Ok, so it's also good to go and experience the arts. I suspect it exposes you to other cultures, it's likely good for your brain, it probably offsets any number of mental diseases. It lowers blood pressure, it engages passion, etc. Any benefits to being a sports spectator? Well I'll be damned. Also "No results found for "watching sports makes you dumber""

Ok, this next one is a gimme. Supporting culture helps cause all the things above, I'm not even going to bother to google whether supporting sports does the same. So I'll just put this here:

(I'd give him $70)


I'm still not 100% sold. Why do sports not have the same reputation as arts, then? Maybe it's because the 'stereotypical' sports fan does not exemplify the benefits above.
We expect to see the fan on the left, instead of the fans on the right.

Ok, I have to wrap this one u

In summary, sports and arts are equally good for you if you let them be. It's easier with arts because we value the benefits, and recognize them, and celebrate them as the primary reason for the thing. In sports, if we value the benefits above more than we value winning, then we see the benefits, and reap them.

I do not say we have to do away with competition, because I believe that competition is heart and soul to sport (this is not fitness, this is sport!)

Now, for a moment, I was terrified that I had talked myself into supporting the public funding of the downtown arena, but I think I have solved that one too. The downtown arena would be privately owned, and thus not erected for the promotion of the benefits above. So I would support a publicly owned arena. Following up from that, I believe we have a good community-owned arena now, owned by "a non-profit, volunteer organization... founded in 1879, before the official incorporation of the city."

What did I miss?