How Many Calories Do I Burn?

Since I now firmly believe that calories out must exceed calories in to lose weight over the long term, how does one estimate calories out?  Nan's Miracle Diet currently recommends a gadget to help. (Nan almost always will recommend some electronic toy in almost any situation.) This particular item is known not-so-catchily as "Bodymedia Fit". It is the same device known as the BodyBugg, which is apparently used on some tv weight loss show. The BodyBugg comes packaged with support and counselling services, while I just got the gadget.

BodyMedia Home

I wear this 2" square device on my upper arm for 23+ hours a day, and it magically tracks my steps, my amount and level of exercise, and my sleep. And, specifically, my calories burned.  Not just a total number, but a graph showing all day when and how many calories are burned.

More on the wonders of the device later, but for now I'm focused on calorie burning. The device is sensitive enough to track the difference if I get up from the computer and walk to the kitchen to get a drink of water and come back. I'll see a spike on the graph. That's how sensitive it is.

So how many calories a day do I burn? Based on the device readings, for the last four weeks I've averaged 2185 kcalories a day.  The highest single day was this Sunday, when I shoveled and shoveled, and walked back and forth to the kids house four times. I hit 2542 - which is quite a percentage over the average. (I also had my best night sleep in weeks after all that exertion in the fresh cold air. My phone rang off the hook and I never roused.) Oddly, "bacon day", Saturday, was a low day at 1973.  I shoveled a lot, but pretty much lay on the couch and watched the snow for the rest of the day.

Here's what I've learned about how I burn calories - or at least how the device estimates them. I'm a bit of a skeptic whether the device always records accurately, because a couple of these points seem odd to me. It really values walking very highly. A day spent walking a lot - not necessarily briskly - will have a higher total than one with just one or two bouts of vigorous exercise. It really docks you for lying around. You've got to get up and move around.  But it doesn't seem to give the NordicTrack or the elliptical machine a lot more credit than walking. When I wear a heart rate monitor there is a tremendous difference.  It also seems to undervalue snow shoveling, based on my experience from the last few days. I think snow shoveling is harder work than walking (no heart rate monitor evidence, though I surely breathe hard) but the device doesn't calculate it that way. Perhaps it's right - I'm working hard, but probably working fewer muscle groups overall. It rated my $200 worth of speedy grocery shopping (about an hour) as high as 35 minutes on the NordicTrack.

Low days are in the 1900's. So far, I've never been so much a slug that it goes below that.  And now I know what makes it go up, I'm aiming at raising my average. I need to get up and walk around more. That is clearly the point. While I love the data, the point is to use the data to modify my behavior in ways that will make me more fit and lose weight. I will be changing things. I sure hope the device is accurate, because I'll be working to make its numbers go up.  As the saying goes, "You get what you measure".