How many calories did I burn? (no watch, no chest strap)
Pick an activity, type your weight and how long you trained: the calculator shows how many calories you burned. No watch, no chest strap, no app that demands a sign-up. Everything runs in your browser, your data goes nowhere.
Under the hood we use a formula from the scientific Compendium of Physical Activities: the same one physiologists, dietitians, and fitness device makers have used for years. Each activity has a MET value: think of it as "how much more energy this activity needs compared to sitting still" (1 MET = resting burn, 8 MET = eight times more).
You get ~30 popular activities: walking, running, cycling, swimming, gym, yoga, HIIT, team sports, household chores. Plus a side-by-side comparison with other activities at the same weight and duration, and how it stacks up in bananas (seriously).
How to use it
- Pick an activity from the list, grouped by category (walking, running, cycling, swimming, gym, sports, household). Each tile shows the MET value, i.e. how much more energy it needs compared to sitting.
- Enter your weight in kg or lb (toggle next to the field). The more you weigh, the more calories the same activity burns, not magic, just physics.
- Enter the duration in minutes. 30 minutes of walking is not the same as 30 minutes of sprinting, but the time always counts in minutes.
- The search field above the list filters by name, handy if you want to find e.g. "yoga" or "swim".
- Below, you see total kcal burned, kcal per minute, equivalents in bananas / chocolate bars, and grams of body fat (with an asterisk, see below).
- The comparison section lines up your activity against other popular ones, at a glance you see whether running burns 3× more than cycling for the same time.
When this is useful
Six typical situations where someone checks how much they burned:
- Planning a workout to hit a calorie target: you want to burn 500 kcal today to stay in your deficit. The calculator shows: 50 minutes of jogging or an hour of brisk walking. You pick what fits.
- Sanity-checking your watch: your watch claims 700 kcal on a 40-minute run. The MET formula says 480. The truth is somewhere in between: wrist-based watches overestimate by up to 30%, and the MET formula overestimates by 10-30%. At least you have a second opinion.
- Comparing different activities: an hour of swimming vs an hour of cycling vs an hour of weights. The bar chart lays them out side by side. Useful when you want to pick something you enjoy that also burns a lot.
- Working off a big meal: you ate a large pizza (~1500 kcal) and want to "earn it back". That's 3 hours of brisk walking or 1.5 hours of running. A bit sobering, and maybe next time you order the salad.
- Explaining to a kid / parent why movement matters. You show them: "30-minute walk = a banana and a half". Concrete numbers land harder than "because it's healthy".
- Choosing the stairs over the elevator: stairs (MET 4.0) burn twice as much as flat walking (MET 3.0). Five minutes of stairs a day × 250 working days = 8000 kcal a year = more than a kilogram of body fat. Small choices, real results.