Feel the Burn

I love this stuff. Today I found a Calories Burned Estimator online. You can enter in your weight and the minutes that you do various exercises in 5 minute increments and they give you calorie burn estimates for each activity. The site also has other calculators that are fun to play with too. Well, fun if you're not in total denial about what your actual body fat and BMI are.

Do you think my desk pedaler counts for anything? Like I said, my muscles are tingley afterwards, but I don't know if that's just due to circulation increase or if there's any aerobic activity going on. Pedaling warms me up and if I'm not freezing already, I may perspire a little. I was thinking maybe the Bicycling - leisure category on the estimator might work. Stationary Bicycle - moderate seems way too vigorous.

And how's this for making a positive step? I have no work to do right now because I ran out of documents to review. I told the attorneys yesterday morning that I would be out soon and one of them emailed me and said she would give me some more. Well, now I'm totally out and no sign of a new folder. So I emailed them all again to remind them, and now I've been here 2 hours and 15 minutes with no work. The work I do is boring, but it's even more boring to be here without anything to do.

But here's the positive part: instead of sitting on my ever-expanding bum, surfing the web, I went for a walk. Downtown DC is so quiet this early on a Saturday morning. Well, comparatively quiet. There's still a little traffic and a few major construction projects jackhammering away, but it's quieter than on a weekday at this time. I walked for 25 minutes, and from prior experience I know my moderately quick walk is about 3 mph. I plugged that into my little calculator and lo and behold I burned 165 calories. Nice.

One caveat with the calculator: I think it overestimates with the elliptical. I did 40 minutes last night on resistance level 6 and the machine said I burned 438 calories. The calculator says 40 minutes on the elliptical burns 688. That's a big difference, but I think I'm going to believe the machine more since it knows how fast I was going and what the incline was and how high I made the resistance.