Effortless Ways to Burn Calories Each Day

Everyone is busy these days and it's hard to find time during the day to work out. Even eating right is a hassle! When you are on a time crunch, it's so much easier just to run through a drive-thru then to plan and cook a healthy meal. So what's a person to do?

Guess what? Burning off calories can be super easy! There are lots of ways to burn calories with little effort.

1. Take a 15 minute walk on your lunch break. You will burn about 80 calories, maybe more, depending how fast you walk.
2. Drink ice cold water before eating a meal. Ice cold water burns calories and will fill you up so you will eat less.
3. Don't keep sweets in your home. When you get a craving, walk to the store instead of driving. You will either decide it's not worth it to walk or walk and burn some extra calories before having your treat.
4. Vigorous cleaning for about twenty minutes burns 100 calories.
5. Opt for stairs instead of taking an elevator.
6. Fifteen minutes of strength training (lunges, crunches, push-ups) will burn about 100 calories. Not only that but strength training will help you burn more calories throughout the day.
7. Play with the kids! Roughhousing with the kids for 30 minutes will burn about 100 calories!
8. Vaccuming for 30 minutes burns roughly 120 calories.
9. Take the dog for a walk. You'll burn calories while keeping your pooch happy!
10. Fidgeting. Surprisingly, nervous and fidgetty people burn an extra 600 to 700 calories per day!
11. Eat negative calorie foods. Your body needs to work harder to break down certain foods in order to digest them. That means you are actually burning calories while eating! Foods like celery, grapefruit, pickles, sauerkraut, onions and lettuce will slim you down.
12. Turn the heat down. You burn more calories when you are cold because your body needs to produce its own heat, thus burning calories.
13. Laugh more throughout the day. Laughter is not only the best medicine, a good hearty laugh will burn quite a few calories too!
14. Drink coffee and tea, especially green tea. Caffeine is a stimulant and will help you burn more calories during the day. Try drinking it plain - without sugar or cream. It will take some getting used to but trust me, after years of drinking my coffee black, I won't drink it any other way.
15. Do desk exercises. I'm a fan of leg lifts. Fifteen lifts per leg a couple times throughout the day works fine. Some more easy exercises to do at your desk can be found below.
16. Dance while getting ready for work in the morning! Just turn your ipod on and have a little fun bopping to the music. You'll burn about 50 extra calories!
17. Exercise during commercial breaks. Don't just sit there! Run in place, do crunches, lunges or jumping jacks.
18. Cook your own meals from scratch. An hour of preparing a healthy home cooked dinner burns over 100 calories.
19. You can burn an extra 500 calories a day standing rather than sitting. Stand while doing things like talking on the phone, texting or reading.
20. Making out. Okay, a fifteen minute make-out session only burns about twenty calories but it's a lot more than just sitting on the couch and watching tv. It's also a lot more fun!