Enjoy the Treat, Then Go for a Walk: How We Think About Brownies and Balance
Most evenings in our family go roughly the same way. Dinner is cleared, the kettle goes on, and someone opens a box of brownies that, strictly speaking, was meant for the shop. We bake them in Manchester all day, and you'd think we'd be sick of the sight of them by now. We're not. A square of fudgy chocolate brownie with a cup of tea, eaten slowly at the kitchen table, is still one of the best bits of the day.
Then, more often than not, someone reaches for their coat. It's an old habit, handed down from grandparents who wouldn't have dreamt of going straight from a big Sunday lunch to the sofa. "Walk it off," they'd say, and out we'd all go, round the block, past the same houses, arguing about nothing in particular.
For years we assumed that walk was just tradition. Then a short video did the rounds suggesting there was more to it, and being curious (and slightly defensive about our brownies), we went and read the research. This is what we found, and how we've folded it into the way we enjoy our own bakes.
We're bakers rather than doctors, so take this as a friendly read, not medical advice. If you have diabetes or any health condition, your GP is the person to talk to.
Is the after-dinner walk just tradition?
It turns out our grandparents were onto something, even if they'd never have put it in these terms.
When you eat something sweet, sugar from it makes its way into your blood, and your body sets about tidying it away. Much of that tidying happens in your muscles. Muscles that are sitting still take up glucose fairly slowly. Muscles that are working draw on it as fuel, and they can do some of that without needing as much help from insulin, the hormone that normally ushers sugar out of the blood.
So the idea is simple: if you get your muscles working soon after you eat, they help the body deal with what you've just had. Not by undoing the treat, or cancelling it out, but by giving that sugar somewhere useful to go. Researchers have been testing this in a few different ways, and the picture they paint is fairly consistent.
What the researchers actually found
The study that got us thinking came from New Zealand. Researchers at the University of Otago worked with adults who had type 2 diabetes and gave them walking advice in two different forms: walk at any point in the day, or walk after your main meals. The total amount of walking was the same either way. Walking after meals led to a smaller rise in blood sugar after eating, and the difference was most noticeable after the evening meal, which is exactly when most of us are sat still and most likely to have pudding. It's worth being clear that everyone in this study had type 2 diabetes, so it tells us most about them, but it was a neat demonstration that when you move can matter as much as how much.
A team at the University of Birmingham then asked the timing question directly, this time with a general group of adults. They had people do the same activity, either walking or a set of simple bodyweight exercises including squats, at different points: before breakfast, straight after it, or a while later. Only the activity done straight after eating softened the blood sugar response. The same effort before breakfast, or left until later, made little difference. Their conclusion was that the timing mattered more than the type of activity, which we found rather encouraging, because it means you don't need to be fit or keen to benefit.
Other researchers looked at the very ordinary problem of sitting down for too long. In Melbourne, a team took overweight and obese adults, gave them a sugary, fatty drink, and compared a long stretch of uninterrupted sitting with the same time broken up by short, easy walks. The walking breaks lowered both blood sugar and insulin afterwards. A later review in Sports Medicine pulled several studies like this together and found that even standing up helped a little, while light walking breaks helped more.
And if walking isn't convenient, there's encouraging news for the kitchen as well. At the University of Toronto, healthy young adults spent long days sitting, broken up either by short walks or by repeated chair stands (similar to squats) with a calf raise. Both kinds of break lowered the body's insulin response after lunch. That finding was about insulin rather than blood sugar itself, and it showed up after lunch rather than breakfast, so it's a gentler result, but it does suggest a few squats can stand in for a walk.
Finally, the oddest one. Researchers at the University of Houston studied a movement you can do sitting down, a sort of calf raise they called the "soleus push-up", which works a small muscle deep in the calf. They found it improved how the body handled blood sugar and fats after eating. It's early, lab-based work, but a nice reminder.
Put together, none of this says treats are good for you, and none of it is a licence to eat a whole box. What it does say is that a little movement, done soon after eating, helps the body along. Which is what our grandparents were telling us all along, minus the citations.
How we'd actually do it
Here's our approach, for what it's worth. First, enjoy the brownie properly. Sit down, put it on a plate, have it with a decent cup of tea or coffee, and don't eat it standing over the sink while answering emails. A treat you barely notice is a treat wasted.
Then, once you've finished and before you sink into the sofa for the evening, get moving for a bit. It doesn't need to be strenuous or planned. A few of our favourites:
- A walk round the block, ideally with someone to talk to.
- Walking the dog, who will not object to an extra outing.
- Squats while the kettle boils for the second cup.
- Calf raises at the sink while you do the washing up.
- A dance in the kitchen. Nobody needs to see it.
- Taking the stairs instead of the lift, or popping up and down them to fetch something you didn't really need.
The point the research keeps coming back to is that timing matters more than intensity. A gentle walk soon after you've eaten seems to do more for how your body handles a treat than a hard workout at some other time of day. You don't need trainers, a plan or a fitness tracker. You just need to not sit still straight away.
If we had to put it in a line: enjoy the treat, then get up and move.
How we bake ours
If a treat is going to be enjoyed properly, it ought to be worth enjoying. That's the other half of how we think about this, and it comes down to what goes in the tin.
Callebaut Belgian chocolate. Chocolate is the backbone of a brownie, so we were never going to skimp on it. We use Belgian chocolate from Callebaut because it melts smoothly, tastes properly of cocoa rather than just sweetness, and gives that deep, rich middle we want.
Real butter. We use butter, not oils or margarine. Butter carries flavour in a way nothing else does, and it gives brownies and blondies their rich, slightly crisp edges and soft centres.
Free-range eggs. Eggs hold everything together and give our bakes their structure and that glossy, crackly top on a good brownie. We use free-range because we'd rather know the eggs came from hens that had a decent life.
Organic flour. There isn't a great deal of flour in a fudgy brownie, but what's there matters. We use organic flour, which bakes reliably and lets the chocolate and butter do the talking.
Organic jams. Where a bake has jam in it, we use organic jams that taste of the fruit they're made from, so the fruit comes through clearly rather than as a vague sweetness.
Brown sugar. Brown sugar brings a gentle, toffee-ish depth and helps keep things moist and chewy. It's a big part of why our blondies taste the way they do, and why our cookies are soft in the middle rather than crumbly.
Natural flavours. We use real vanilla rather than a synthetic imitation, and in our red velvet the colour comes from beetroot rather than a bottle of dye. Beetroot gives a lovely, slightly earthy red, and no, you can't taste it.
Our own caramel. We caramelise our own caramel, slowly, in the bakery. Sugar goes in the pan and is coaxed, carefully and with a fair bit of watching, until it turns a deep amber, then butter and cream go in. It takes patience and the occasional burnt batch, but bought-in caramel simply doesn't taste the same.
What ties it together is a fairly old-fashioned idea: these are ingredients you can name, the sort you'd find in anyone's pantry. We don't use the industrial shortcuts that turn up in a lot of mass-produced cakes: no seed oils, no hydrogenated fats, no artificial preservatives. That isn't about making our bakes something they're not. They're treats, and we're happy for them to stay that way. It's about quality and honesty, and baking things the way they ought to be baked.
If you're deciding where to start, our guide to brownies vs blondies explains what separates the two, and our piece on what makes a New York-style cookie covers the cookies.
A good treat, and a walk afterwards
So, back to the kitchen table and the box that was meant for the shop. Our view hasn't really changed since we started reading: a good treat, made properly from ingredients you can name, is worth sitting down for and enjoying without a shred of guilt. And a bit of movement afterwards, a stroll round the block or a few squats by the kettle, isn't penance. It's just a sensible habit that lets you keep enjoying the things you love.
Our grandparents would be pleased to know they were right. We bake, pack and post everything from Manchester to anywhere in the UK. Order before our afternoon cut-off and we dispatch the same day on a next-day tracked service, so your next after-dinner brownie, and the walk that follows it, needn't be far off.