It’s the perfect time of year to start spring cleaning and preparing for swimsuit season. What if we told you could do both at once? Your household chores can actually help you burn calories. Essentially, you can clean your way to a fitter you.

We know that to burn calories you have to stay active, but we often forget that household chores are activities. In fact, many of them take a bit of elbow grease. But, do you know exactly how many calories you can burn? We consulted an online calculator to give you a basis for what to expect. However, you’ll need to put your exact information in to get a more accurate result. We based our results on a 35 year old female, 5’6″, 150 lbs.

• One Hour Cleaning Gutters = 360 Calories burned
• One Hour Cleaning Windows = 225 Calories burned
• One Hour Dusting and Polishing Furniture = 161 Calories burned
• One Hour Mowing the Lawn (push mower) = 297 Calories burned
• One Hour Doing Laundry = 144 Calories burned
• 30 minutes Rearranging Furniture = 225 Calories burned
• 30 minutes Mopping = 153 Calories burned
• 20 minutes Washing Dishes = 51 Calories burned
• 15 minutes Ironing = 38 Calories burned

In many cases, you will probably be doing more than one activity a day, so your calories burned would add up. For example, if you washed dishes, took care of the laundry, ironed, and mopped all in one day you could burn around 386 calories. Of course the heftier jobs will burn a bit more, if you decided to spend your day outdoors cleaning gutters and mowing the lawn your calories burned would be a total of 657.

This calculation only covers some of the activities you may find yourself involved in. There are plenty of ways to lose weight during spring cleaning, or even just doing everyday activities. Did you know that 30 minutes of cooking could burn 90 calories? If you’d like to know more about how many calories you can burn around the house, check out Health Status’ calorie burning calculator.

We think this is a great way to stay fit and lose weight, because the accomplishment is two-fold. You can feel good about a cleaner house and a healthier you.