How household chores led to 75 pound weight loss for local woman

Did you know you can burn hundreds of calories with chores like gardening, vacuuming and painting?

Talitta Coleman lost 75 pounds over five years with a workout routine that was mostly at home.

"Sometimes you just get in the routine and I don't even know that I'm doing it anymore, so it just kind of comes natural," Coleman said.

Her routine is exercising and eating right. She's in online support groups, has a strict diet program and makes healthy choices while she's at restaurants, but everything she does to maintain her successful weight loss is at home, no gym or money required, a lot of the time with everyday chores.

"It's a lot easier and plus you don't have to worry about what you look like when you go to work out,” she said.
While vacuuming, Coleman said she burns about 250 calories. By squatting down and going up for a calf raise, she makes it a total leg workout.

Plus she recommends adding some leg work to unloading groceries. At Coleman’s home in Anderson, Texas she has cows and horses that require lifting big bags of feed, but she says you can do this with any pet food.

Get any pet involved in an hour of outside playtime and she said that can burn another 250 calories.

“Just running back and forth, playing with the dogs, I’m out of breath, my heart rate is up, I’m starting to sweat and I was having fun, it wasn't really exercise,” Coleman said.

Your pets will thank you, and so will your waistline.

“You would technically need to burn about 500 calories a day in order to burn that one pound weight loss for that week,” she said.

Once you're a little more advanced, she recommends washing floors by hand. She said by ditching the mop, you’ll engage all of your major muscle groups.

“You have to have your core tight to keep yourself up and then you've got your legs, like right now if you were doing this as I’m doing it, my legs are on fire: the front, the back and the glutes.”

While she does other exercises to maintain weight loss, she does not go to the gym. She said there’s enough home workouts to burn the calories she needs.

She's also said a lot of moms do activities like this while holding small kids to add weight to the routine.

Other suggestions for burning calories at home

add squats and lunges to making the bed
gardening, may burn around 300 calories in half an hour
three hours of painting could burn up to 1,000 calories