from a Spark trivia - how many calories get burned

I learned a few things since I posted my original comment; thanks for the education folks :)

Eric,

A pretty standard assumption in calorie burn figures is that a sedentary lifestyle burns about 20% in addition to BMR. For someone with 1500 BMR, this is 300 calories. Is it that hard to believe that 136 of that comes from housework?

And yes, people don't do heavy cleaning or yard work every day. But it does help to bring the overall average up.

M@L

I'll agree as long as the figure includes BMR, which I am still pretty sure most people don't understand fully. We agree again.

That does include the BMR.

Light activity will burn around 4-5 cals per minute. Exercise is more like 6-8. At 4cpm it would only take 34 minutes to burn that much.

Get up in the morning and spend a couple of minutes empyting your dishwasher. Put a load of laundry on and vaccuum the floors. Later in the day put that laundry on the line, tidy up the kids' rooms, and make a healthy lunch. Then clean up the lunch dishes, sort out that pile of stuff you've been meaning to put away some day, and bring in and fold all that laundry. Later that evening there's preparing and cooking a meal and cleaning up after that, too.

Easily adds up. You don't imagine that you would spend 34 minutes straight on "vaccuuming" or something, but in a whole day, an average householder could very easily add up to 34 minutes of housework.

Anyway, debate about whether YOU would is irrelevant. Clearly the figure is potentially possible. If it averaged out to 70 minutes a day I'd be saying that's pretty unlikely, but half an hour? C'mon. On average? Easy.

137 calories per day including the BMR for the same period of time, right?

How many people do vigorous housework on a daily basis? Mu mother is a neat freak, and she doesn't mop the floor of her kitchen every day, nor does she vacuum all the time.

I can't see how average, swiffering the floor and dusting the tabe-type housework can burn as many calories as running a mile, unless the BMR is added in as well.

And yet, as M@L points out, it's only just over 100 calories per day on average.

While we should not consider such activities as "exercise" and track them, everything you do does actually "burn calories" and it's not at all inconceivable that "ordinary vacuuming, wiping the counters, etc." could burn 137 calories per day - That's probably less than half an hour doing housework.

How often do people do heavy housework?

I think the message is misleading if people think ordinary vacuuming, wiping the counters, etc., is a real calorie burner as a result.

It really depends on how and what you have to clean. When I clean I end up scrubbing, moving furniture, constantly going up and down ladders, and lugging around various clean supplies. This doesn't include yardwork

From memory, it quoted a figure of 50,000 calories per year, which is equivalent to 136 calories per day. If "housework" consists of putting a frozen dinner in the micowave, and then throwing the packaging in the trash, then this might be a little high.

But if you consider some of the more physical housework tasks, such as heavy scrubbing or yardwork, then this doesn't seem unreasonable as an overall average.

M@L

My bet is that the # provided by SP for housecleaning calories burned includes the BMR calorie burn that would also occur even if you were sitting on the couch. Double-dipping, a favorite technique of calorie burn exaggeration.

The question on the Spark trivia quiz I just took was a multiple choice for how many calories you burn each year doing housework?

I'm not debating whether housework is exercise or not - that's a different topic:) Without divulging the correct trivia answer, my thought is that the number of calories burned in doing a year's worth of housework was overestimated by the reference source used.