Calculating Energy Expenditure

If you want to control your blood glucose during exercise, and avoid hypoglycaemia during and following exercise, you will need not only to adjust your insulin doses but also have some idea about how much extra food you will need. Clearly, as you become more experienced, and through trial and error, you will make your own plan, but to help you, here is a table of the typical energy expenditure of different activities.

Table of energy expenditure per minute at different weights for various activities

There are 2 ways of doing this. You can work out the sedentary minutes and active minutes using the table below. This  would be the best method if you are doing very different levels of activity each day. The second method it simpler, using the equation to work out your resting metabolic rate, and then multiply it by the factor appropriate to your activity.

Method 1

To work out your energy needs of exercise, look at your activity at your weight, and multiply by the time (in minutes) of the activity.

The calculated value is an estimate of calories needed to support exercise. You can then work out how much you will need to replace. 1 gram of glucose or other carbohydrate has 4 calories. So for example, a 80 Kg person rowing for 1 hour will need 60 x 16.5 or 990 kCals, which is 247.5 grams of glucose. You don't need to replace all the energy during the exercise period, as most will come from muscle and liver stores, but the energy will need to be replaced over the day. Try to replace some of the energy continually during the exercise rather than at the start or end, where it will cause large changes in blood glucose.

Method 2

To determine your daily calorie expenditure multiply your

Multiply RMR by one of the below activity factors

To determine your daily calorie expenditure multiply your RMR by one of the below activity factors