Calorie tracking while mooching

[haipollai]

Hi. I want an activity tracker that is very accurate at tracking calories consumed while standing still pretty much in one spot but doing everyday active stuff like, I don't know, scrubbing a bath or sitting playing with a puppy. I want to track calories consumed doing stuff I HAVE to do rather than exercise that is in a formally defined category from a selection of maybe 30 activities. I see that it is easy to track calories during exercise particularly outdoors with almost any tracker.

If anyone has happened to notice their perhaps low-tech or old-school tracker is actually good at this please let me know. As far as I can see, fancy activity trackers are good at what they are designed for, tracking effort exerted during exercise done mostly outside where you are moving a lot or your heart rate is high.

In a recent Which review I believe the best buys tended to say "doesn't track steps inside so well" or "no heart rate monitor". I'd love to see the calories burning up during housework, like I said.

Thanks.

I don’t think they are particularly accurate in that way tbh. You should just focus on calories to lose weight.
Work out your tdee, reduce the maintenance dose by 20% to get a calorie target, and you will lose weight without any activity at all. Focus on calories in rather than what you think you burned by mopping the floor.
https://tdeecalculator.net/

My ancient fitbit alta hr seems to do a pretty good job of this, it works out energy burned from heart rate. If anything it overestimates steps a little, I don't think most people get many from moving around the house though unless you have a mansion.

@haipollai You should check out a Garmin's "Forerunner" range of smart watches. They track both resting and active calories, calculated using your heart rate & resting metabolic rate. I love mine :)

i have a garmin forerunner that tracks heart rate and calorie burn all the time you're wearing it. It's so hard to burn any amount of calories to make an impact on weight loss through exercise that anything you do in terms of housework type "activity" is really going be very minimal.

Any decent activity tracker can do what you want, OP. Or else I don't know what you want. As long as it tracks your heart rate.

the trackers calc the calories based on your heart rate (optical sensor underneath watch face is reasonably accurate) PLUS info like your sex, age, mass, and assuming you have average Vo2max for age. Or you can use an old fashioned Polar HR monitor & put your daily numbers into an online calculator to do the same thing.

Since you have a heart rate all the time, & most of the trackers have a heart rate optical sensor, most of them calc all the sitting around calories, too. They give you a total for the day including the doing nothing time.