[vasiliys]

tl;dr: Do something like professional chess, that:

1. Takes hours each day.

2. Creates a persistent stress response while you do it.

3. Distracts you from food.

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Using heart rate to estimate calories burned is mentioned. Has anyone here actually used their fitness tracker to discover an unexpected calorie sink?

e.g. I've had an action movie fight scene on the gym TV grab my attention for a couple minutes, and transition me into a sprint on the elliptical machine, without me realizing. Nifty, but I couldn't reproduce the effect.

[doubled112]

Sounds like my time as a system administrator at a smaller software shop.

1. At least eight hours a day, usually more.

2. Often two or three people lined up waiting for help by my cube, relentless Slack messages, it's release day but they found a bug. Sounds persistently stressful.

3. Who has time to eat with all that going on?

Sounds like a YMMV kind of solution. In fact, I've since moved on and I think I'm losing some pudge I'd put on there. Point two probably grew my list of bad habits though, so maybe chess grandmasters have a discipline level I don't.

[eptcyka]

How does the fitness tracker measure calories burned? Mine always require to know my bodyweight so that they can approximate the amount of calories burnt by calculating the energy needed to transfer the specific amount of meat via locomotion. I don't think measuring the heart rate would be a useful proxy either. I think the only reasonable way to properly mesaure the amount of energy used by playing chess would be to measure the amount of CO2 that's exhaled during a game and at rest and compare that.