So I monitored myself for a half hour last night while watching TV and it came out to 4.73 calories burned per minute watching TV. But that makes no sense. That means if I watched TV all day I'd burn 6,800 calories (I wish!). Based on the Mifflin St Jeor & Katch-McArdle formulas body burns somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,950 to 3025 calories a day, so 6,800 calories watching TV all day isn't even close to reality.
So now I'm seriously questioning the whole "calories burned" values that I'm getting. From what I'm reading the whole calories burned thing only really works "properly" with steady-state cardio. So it's probably not going to work with TV watching and I'm guessing it doesn't work properly during weightlifting either (since that's really spikey).
So two questions are:
- How do I get accurate calories burned for workouts that include things other than steady state cardio?
- How do I determine the rate at which I burn calories during sedentary activities?