12 hour shifts and weight loss calories

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Specializes in Acute Care Cardiac, Education, Prof Practice.

So I would have posted this in Allnurses Central, however my work computer blocks the site as "personal and networking" therefore I will just drop it off here. :)

To those of you on wieght loss regiments, do you calculate (and if so how much) calories burned for a 12 hour shift?

I have heard that you can't count calories burned at work because your body is used to it, therefore it has the calories figured in. However working nights and random days of the week I think my body is far from used to it.

Also I am on a 1396 calories per day diet and have been dropping weight a little too rapidly, therefore my husband and I figured on work nights I should either up my calories to something like 1800 or try to calculate the amount of calories burned "roughly" (we are dieting for life style change and fertility, not short term).

Tonight I calculated two hours of "slow walking" for about 240 calories which seems to have made me feel a little more full this evening.

Any suggestions or ideas are appreciated.

Tait

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Specializes in Hospice, Adult Med/Surg.

It sounds like you are on the right track. A nurse burns quite a lot of calories on any given shift, assuming that she doesn't have a desk job. When I started working part-time 3-11 shift several years ago, the weight literally fell off of me without much effort, just because I was suddenly walking several extra miles a day up and down the halls of the hospital and had a lot less time to sit down and snack. If you figure in a reasonable amount of extra calories like you are doing, it will help to prevent you from doing what I used to do when I worked 12 hr. nights. I would eat a small snack in that whole long shift , even though I was getting a bunch of exercise, and then I would be so completely starved by the time I got off work at 7 AM that I would go through McDonald's drive-thru on my way home from work and order a calorie-intense breakfast like an egg mcmuffin and hashbrowns then go home and sleep. Needless to say, my weight went up instead of down!

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Specializes in ED, ICU, PSYCH, PP, CEN.

On a couple of different weight loss sites I saw that working as a nurse was equivalent to approximately 180 calories per hour. Just google something to the effect of calories per hour and you should get a couple of lists including calories for biking, running, walking etc.

I to have read that your body gets used to the work workout and you have to go over that amount of exercise to lose.

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Specializes in Cardiac, Hospice, Float pool, Med/Peds.

Working nights is very hard... I don't eat at all during the day and snack at night when working. I try to not eat when I get home but that does not work sometimes. It is a juggling act for sure... Good luck. Have you tried Sparkpeople.com? I lost about 100 pounds using that site. Give it a try.

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Sparkpeople.com is an excellent site for calorie tracking, as well as calculating how many calories/day over a certain amount of time to reach a specific weight loss goal. I think that whether you count your work as calories burned is up to you--I personally only count exercise that is "above and beyond" my regular daily activities.

ET

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Specializes in Post-surgical, Respiratory.

The calories burned depends on your height and weight and intensity of the shift.

Step 1

Convert your weight in pounds to kilograms by dividing by 2.2. For example, if you weigh 176 pounds then you weigh 80 kilograms.

Step 2

Look up the MET value of the activity that you performed. These figures are available from the websites of the National Cancer Institute and the Institute of Lifestyle Medicine as well as in the Compendium of Physical Activities Tracking Guide, which is available on the website of the University of South Carolina Arnold School of Public Health. For example, general cycling has a MET value of 8.0.

Step 3

Multiply the MET value by your weight in kilograms. If you weigh 80 kilograms and perform an activity like cycling with a MET value of 8.0, for example, this would give you 640 as a product.

Step 4

Multiply the product by the time you performed the activity in hours to get the number of calories you burned. For example, if you cycled for 30 minutes then you would multiply 640 by 0.5 to get 320 calories.

[per Livestrong's site:]How to Calculate Calories Burned | LIVESTRONG.COM

I like to just use MyFitnessPal in tandem with Edmondo and it's much easier for me to do on a daily basis

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