The customer service workout: How many calories do you burn helping customers?

Did you know that the typical adult human brain requires 20% of your resting metabolic rate (RMR – that’s the total amount of energy your body expends at rest)? So let’s say that your RMR is 1,500 calories. That means your brain uses up 300 of those just to keep you going. For customer service reps who work in largely sedentary jobs, save for the occasional trip to the bathroom or water cooler, the majority of your calories burned by office work is just by your basic functions – breathing, digestion, thinking, etc. Add in things like typing and sitting, and it doesn’t seem like you’d burn much more. But calories add up! Let’s take a look at what CSRs do on the regular, and how many calories they expend.

According to Harvard Health Publications, for people weighing 125, 155, or 185 pounds, every 30 minutes of these activities burns the corresponding number of calories:

We extrapolated the data for customer service employees to come up with 1 hour and 8 hour totals from Harvard Health’s 30 minute estimates.:

Curious how these figures break down to an 8 hour work day? We’ve estimated how much time an average customer service employee spends on each of the activities listed above and came up with the following: