Crazy amount of calories burned by cleaning...

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Pudders3
Pudders3 Posts: 9 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
I only normally log calories burned by intentional exercise, ie yoga, running etc. But today, I've just spent about 4 hours moving furniture, painting the living room, hovering and putting everything back. This is significantly more "normal activity" than I usually do in a day, so I decided to log it. Wary of overestimating and subsequently eating lots of chocolate, I chose to log only half of the time and chose "cleaning, light, moderate effort", rather than saying it was heavy, vigorous effort. MFP thinks I've burned 408 calories!!!! Comparing how I feel now (normal) to how I feel immediately after jogging for 20 minutes (about to die...), I just feel like this can't be right! I'm interested to know if anyone else logs normal household activity like this, eats back the calories, and is still losing? I just don't trust it, so I'm thinking of eating back about 100-200 cal if I want a snack later and then leave it at that. Thoughts?

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  • psuLemon
    psuLemon Posts: 38,411 MFP Moderator
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    With cleaning, I would only add another 100 calories or nothing at all.
  • guroprincess
    guroprincess Posts: 140
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    MFP always overestimates burns. Honestly I wouldn't even put things like cleaning in (or anything that wasn't specifically exercise) but that's just me personally.
  • ninerbuff
    ninerbuff Posts: 48,708 Member
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    100 calories an hour? That's not over estimating unless you're really light.

    A.C.E. Certified Personal/Group FitnessTrainer
    IDEA Fitness member
    Kickboxing Certified Instructor
    Been in fitness for 30 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition
  • 294Rich
    294Rich Posts: 171 Member
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    100 calories an hour? That's not over estimating unless you're really light.

    A.C.E. Certified Personal/Group FitnessTrainer
    IDEA Fitness member
    Kickboxing Certified Instructor
    Been in fitness for 30 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

    All I would add to this is that sitting on your bum burns about 50 calories an hour, so they are only buring an additional 50 cals and hour, on this basis. So that's 200 calories above the usual calorie burn per day, at most. And this is one of the good reasons why you can't eat back all of your exercise calories!

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