The average flight of stairs contains 12 steps. For a person weighing between 150 and 160 pounds, climbing one flight of stairs three times per day burns approximately 15 calories, according to the Health Sciences Center of the University of New Mexico.
If your master bedroom is upstairs, how many times in a week do you think you would go up the stairs? My kids’ rooms are upstairs so I am up and down those stairs at least 5 times a day. If my room were up there too, I think I would easily go up the stairs 10 times a day, twice that on weekends with laundry, vacuuming, reading to the kids, and looking for lost socks, flashlights, and overdue library books. I would factor in the weight of laundry baskets and cleaning equipment in order to get more caloric credit but in deference to pure science, we’ll work with the numbers from University of New Mexico.
If you burn 5 calories everytime you go up the stairs and you go up them 90 times in one week (10 times per week day, 20 on Saturday and Sunday) then that’s 450 calories a week.
Here’s a list of fantastic things that cost you 450 calories:
- Wendy’s Ultimate Chicken Grill Sandwich with a Mandarin Orange Cup and Iced Tea
- Two margaritas
- Caramel Frappuccino from Starbucks
- Mini Browie Cookie Dough Blizzard from Dairy Queen
- 1.75 chili dogs from the Varsity in Athens 14 cups of steamed broccolli
Instead of eating those 450 calories you are burning per week going up to your master bedroom, you could bank those credits. There are 3500 calories in a pound. That adds up to 7 pounds a year you could lose just by having a master bedroom upstairs!
We all know the importance of maintaing a healthy weight for longevity. Here’s a list of the top 10 causes of death in America from the National Center for Health Statistics. The list is based on 2014 data.
● Heart disease: 614,348
● Cancer: 591,699
● Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 147,101
● Accidents (unintentional injuries): 136,053
● Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 133,103
● Alzheimer’s disease: 93,541
● Diabetes: 76,488
● Influenza and pneumonia: 55,227
● Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 48,146
● Intentional self-harm (suicide): 42,773
I’m just a real estate agent but I know several items on this list can be contributed to weight.
Having a master bedroom upstairs increases your opportunity to lose weight, stay flexible and keeps you away from the noise of the rest of the house.Here’s to climbing upwards!