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About this tool
Calories burned prepping, cooking, serving and washing up, from compendium MET values for kitchen work and your body weight.
This calculator estimates the calories you burn cooking a meal by pricing each kitchen stage at its published MET value and multiplying by your body weight and the minutes you spend on it. It uses the metabolic-equivalent formula kcal/min = MET x 3.5 x kg / 200, with MET values for prep, stove work, dough work, serving and washing up taken from the 2011 Compendium of Physical Activities. It is aimed at anyone who wants to see how much of a day's movement actually happens in the kitchen, and it separates gross calories from the net figure above resting metabolism.
Open Cooking Calorie Burn Calculator on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Enter the values you already know.
Fine-tune the options to match your scenario.
Read the result and use it in your planning or reporting.
Each stage carries its own compendium code and MET value rather than one blanket number for 'cooking'.
Shows calories above resting metabolism, which is the only part genuinely attributable to the cooking itself.
A per-stage table shows exactly which part of the meal cost the most energy.
Roughly 120 to 200 kcal for a 70 kg adult, depending on how active the hour is. Light standing prep is 2.0 METs (about 147 kcal an hour at 70 kg), while general kitchen activity that mixes cooking, washing and tidying is 3.3 METs (about 242 kcal an hour at the same weight).
It counts as light physical activity, not exercise. Most kitchen tasks fall between 1.8 and 3.5 METs, and moderate-intensity activity only starts at 3.0 METs, so cooking contributes to daily movement and NEAT but does not usually meet the WHO guideline of 150 minutes of moderate activity a week on its own.
One MET is resting metabolism, defined as 3.5 mL of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute. Because the definition is per kilogram, a heavier person moves more mass and burns proportionally more calories doing exactly the same task, which is why weight is a required input.
If you are tracking calories on top of a resting or basal metabolic rate that already covers the whole day, use the net figure, otherwise you would double-count the resting portion. The tool shows both, and the difference over an hour is about 74 kcal for a 70 kg adult. For weight-management decisions, check the approach with a registered dietitian.
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