Count the ways to burn calories

I’m a low-tech exerciser. I don’t use PDAs, software programs or even pedometers to track my progress. I go to the gym, I sweat, I come home. Several years ago a personal trainer persuaded me to get a heart-rate monitor. It’s still sitting in my sock drawer, unopened.

But the exercise industry and technology are in a long-term relationship that continues to spawn items such as fitness cellphones and running shoes with microprocessors. The latest is a device called the BioTrainer, which promises to track calories burned doing “lifestyle activities” -- walking, gardening, playing with the dog, etc. It looks like a pedometer and is worn the same way, clipped to a waistband or belt.

The BioTrainer is an accelerometer, which has a sensor that records forward, back, vertical and rotational movement plus the intensity of that movement. (Pedometers just track steps taken.) The BioTrainer converts that movement into calories burned based on your weight.

After entering my weight I went to the gym to see how the BioTrainer’s calorie count compared with cardio machines’. I know those machines skew high, but I still get an enormous amount of satisfaction thinking I’ve burned 800 calories an hour, even if it is a total lie.

A half-hour on the elliptical trainer (the kind with moving arms) earned me 440 calories, according to the machine, and 260, according to the BioTrainer. I was disappointed, but I could live with that number. I had a harder time with the results for a half-hour on the StairMaster -- 330 on the machine, 80 on the BioTrainer.

Eighty? I stared at the number for several minutes in disbelief, knowing via the puddle of sweat on the floor that I had burned far more than that.

I quickly became obsessed with knowing how many calories various activities burned. Driving to the gym: 3.5. Running to the car in the rain: 12. Doing an errand at lunch: 75. Spending 12 hours puttering around the house, engaging in a lot of activity (laundry, playing with the cats, washing dishes, etc.): 299. I found most of the results discouraging and hardly enough to burn off those weekly Starbucks binges.

Not to worry, said Patrick Cioffi Jr., chief executive of Premier Partners, a Florida-based company that’s marketing the product, set to debut in April with ads and infomercials, some featuring fitness guru Denise Austin. It’ll sell for about $40, with optional software that allows users to download results into a Windows program available for about $20.

In a phone interview (17 calories), Cioffi explained that although the BioTrainer can distinguish variations in intensity of exercise, it can’t register resistance. In other words, it knows if I increase my speed while walking, but not that I’m walking on a steep incline. That’s why my StairMaster reading was so low -- the BioTrainer only calculated my steps, not how hard I was working. I mentally gave myself an extra 250 calories.

Cioffi added that the BioTrainer also won’t register total calories burned during strength training, and it doesn’t measure metabolic caloric burn, calories used to keep the body -- lungs, brain, heart, cells -- running. Considering all this, wasn’t the BioTrainer’s calorie count incomplete? How was I really supposed to know how many calories I’d really burned in a day?

“You use this as a component of an overall understanding of what your caloric burn is,” Cioffi explained. “Only a small percentage of the population goes to the gym. The average person needs to have some way to measure their caloric burn. With this you’re able to get a fair assessment of your caloric burn on a daily basis.”

I was beginning to understand. The BioTrainer isn’t really for people like me or Cioffi, regular gym rats who know intuitively how many calories they consume versus how many calories they burn. It’s for people who have no clue that the Cinnabon they just ate contains 813 calories and 32 grams of fat, and no little stroll around the mall is going to burn that off.

“What you’re trying to do is get couch potatoes, or people who need to be motivated, to wear the device,” said David Krausman, who developed the BioTrainer with a grant from the National Institutes of Health. Krausman is chief executive of a medical research and development company called Individual Monitoring Systems Inc., based in Baltimore, Md.

“We also see big applications for school systems,” he added, “where they would be able to use this as a recorder for physical activity.” Many schools already use pedometers to measure students’ movement.

Krausman is well aware that calorie counting can be a frustrating thing, as when someone gets the disappointing news that a busy day around the house has burned only 300 calories. That’s why the BioTrainer has an extra feature that tracks “activity units.” For every calorie burned, users earn 40 activity units; an average person accumulates about 16,000 units per day doing moderate activity, according to the BioTrainer’s instruction sheet. At the end of the day, most people are happier looking at the number 16,000 than 400.

“People are more motivated by bigger numbers, and they get depressed looking at calories,” Krausman said, “so we came up with a measure that is our version of Weight Watchers points.”

Accelerometers have been around for years but were primarily used for research studies in areas such as obesity, heart disease and sports medicine. Costing hundreds or even thousands of dollars, they were out of reach for most people. An accelerometer called Caltrac that sells for about $70 has been available for 13 years to universities, fitness trainers and consumers, but the company hasn’t done much mass marketing to let the public know about it, according to Lauri Lewallen, of the Torrance-based parent company Muscle Dynamics Fitness Network. The Caltrac calculates calories but does it based on the user’s weight, height, age and sex. It also claims to track activity as well as metabolic calorie burn.

Studies on the validity of the BioTrainer done by Krausman as well as by others not connected with the company show that the immediate feedback of the calorie counter does motivate people to stay on a fitness program. Studies on accuracy show some variation in overestimating and underestimating actual calories burned.

Accelerometers such as the BioTrainer may be helpful for some, said Guy Le Masurier, an assistant professor of kinesiology at Penn State who has done research using accelerometers, although he hasn’t worked with the BioTrainer.

“It provides estimated energy expenditure, and there are obviously limitations to that,” he said. “But at a time when new dietary and exercise recommendations have come out, people can look at how many activity calories they’ve burned compared to their energy intake. If you can burn an extra 3,500 calories a week while maintaining your diet, that’s equal to a pound of fat. I think it could be a useful tool for some people.”

I must send my BioTrainer back, but it’s with mixed feelings. I’d still like to know how many calories I’m burning while running through an airport, chasing after my nephews or covering trade shows. I need something to justify those Frappuccinos.

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Times staff writer Jeannine Stein can be reached by e-mail at jeannine.stein@latimes.com.