Everyday Activity Calorie Counter

Calorie-counting can be an important part of a healthy lifestyle, whether you're looking to lose weight, put it on or just maintain your figure. Knowing how many calories you're eating and how many you're burning through exercise, or just from walking around, enables you to manage your weight with scientific precision.

Function

As the government's Weight-Control Information Network notes, maintaining a healthy weight requires you to balance the amount of calories you take in through food and drink with the amount of calories you burn during daily activity. You can calculate the amount you take in by consulting the packaging on the food you eat, while you can calculate the amount you burn by using a calorie calculator.

Calorie Calculators

Calorie calculators indicate how many calories you burn during certain activities, based on factors such as your weight. The heavier you are, the more energy you will burn, because the extra weight causes your muscles to work harder. Also, larger muscles require more energy. But while calculators will estimate how many calories you burn during a certain period of exercise, they do not consider how the exercise will affect your metabolism. Intense exercise causes your body to burn calories even after you stop, a factor known as afterburn.

Basal Metabolic Rate

Another important factor is your metabolism and how many calories you consume during everyday activity. If you calculate your basal metabolic rate, you can calculate how many calories you need to maintain your ideal weight. The BMR is based on your weight, height, age, gender, level of fitness and amount of exercise. Different formulas calcuate the rate differently, but they will all give you a general figure of how many calories you burn throughout the day.

Figures

According to research data published in "Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise," the official journal of the American College of Sports Medicine, the amount of energy you burn doing daily activities varies according to your weight. For example, a 130-lb. woman cleaning for an hour would burn 207 calories, compared with 326 calories for a 205-lb. man. Walking the dog for an hour burns about 177 calories for the smaller woman and 279 calories for the larger man. In comparison, an hour of moderate cycling on an exercise bike would burn 413 and 651 calories, respectively.

Considerations

Dieting and health are not just a matter of putting numbers into equations. Most of these calculations are not exact, so always use an element of judgment when it comes to these figures. Your body will always adjust to your habits, so one workout will burn a different amount of calories on one day than another, depending on other factors, such as how tired you are. For most people, counting exact calories taken in and burned is not just impractical, it is unimportant. A rough idea can help with your health goals, but investing too much time and effort may prevent you from actually enjoying eating or exercising.