As Will Smith rattles off in the beloved Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, he felt “My life got flipped-turned upside down” when he moved to his new home.
And many parents feel exactly the same when their baby is born. There’s no time for exercise, you’re constantly deprived of sleep, and your whole life seems to revolve around this bundle of joy who’s growing way too fast.
You might miss going to your regular your spinning class or yoga sessions. But you might not have realised you the calories burned as a parent may be more than what you used to expend pre-baby!
Study reveals parents burn up to 50,000 calories per month through parenting
Image source: Wren’s Kitchen
A recent study by UK-based Wren Kitchens surveyed 1,000 parents who have children aged between three and six years old. The Kitchen retailer measured the effort and calories burned with calorielab.com as a rough estimate. The calorie values were calculated average weight
The results showed parents burn 1,478 calories daily through standard housework and childcare activities.
Looking further into the details, you’ll see that the activity that burnt the most calories was carrying small children.
Parents spent nearly 2 hours carrying their little ones, which used up 259 calories. For context, that’s the same as doing 218 burpees!
Closely following that was childcare, which involved cleaning, bathing, and feeding your little one. Making sure your child was looked after took up 102 minutes on average, and used up 245 calories.
Image source: Wren’s Kitchen
As for the weekly calorie expenditure, 2,374 calories were burnt as a result of typical parenting activities.
The most intensive weekly activity was mopping. Parents reported spending an average of 138 minutes (or 2 hours 18 minutes) putting in some elbow grease to get squeaky clean floors. This burned 405 calories! You can probably relate to that considering how taxing it can be to keep your house clean (just don’t overdo it with a crazy cleaning schedule, though!)
The least intensive was doing the laundry, where the average time spent cleaning clothes was reported to be 71 minutes, burning 202.
If burpees were the main unit of comparison, your legs would turn into jelly trying to do enough to match the same calorie value!
Do you feel you burnt that many calories in a month?