How Many Calories Do You Burn Cleaning the House?

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I’ve always been curious about how many calories I burn by cleaning the house, playing with my daughter, working at the computer, etc.  I’ve been using my new toy to find out:

The above is a breakdown of the calories I burned yesterday (while not shown here, the total number of calories burned was 3,155).  The number on the left of the graph is the calories I burned per minute. And yes, I will see how high I can get that number.

The graph goes like this:  I woke up a little after 5 AM and worked out at home, then sat down at the computer for a long day of work.  Afterward, I picked up my daughter from school and came home to galavant outside, which is the spike you see around 7 PM.

After returning inside and taking it easy for a while, I finally got around to cleaning and doing a few chores around the house.  This is the hour of the graph that I highlighted in dark grey between 8:11 and 9:11. This hour consisted of doing the laundry, washing dishes, wiping down counters, picking up toys (not mine) and other basic chores.

I burned just over 200 calories by cleaning the house for 60 minutes.

According to MyFitnesspal’s calculator and a handful of other calculators that estimate calories burned from exercise, the readings from my armband are pretty accurate. Most references that I’ve found estimate that “light household chores” and cleaning the house burns between 200-250 calories in 60 minutes for my weight of 217.

As a type A personality, I love this kind of data. While the food you and I eat are mainly responsible for our weight loss, I love keeping track of personal bests (steps taken per day, calories burned per day, etc). I’m already trying to take more steps every day and beat my record from last Saturday when I went to Wal-Mart to pickup a few things.

Those few things were at opposite ends of the store, so I probably walked a couple of miles. That doesn’t include the hike from the parking lot.

And maybe it’s just me wondering this, but I’m really curious how many calories I burn during sex.  Hopefully I won’t have to wait too much longer for that data.