Calories burned during exercise

I had a look on the Internet yesterday and found this fantastic web site that gives calories burned for a very wide range of exercise and activities: http://www.nutristrategy.com/activitylist4.htm. I looked up swimming and found that there are several categories. The numbers give calories burned per hour for a person weighing 190 lbs (I weigh 210 but this was the closest weight category available for me):

Swimming laps, freestyle, fast, vigorous effort - 863
Swimming laps, freestyle, light/moderate effort - 690
Swimming, backstroke, general - 690
Swimming, breaststroke, general - 863
Swimming, butterfly, general - 949
Swimming, leisurely, general - 518
Swimming, sidestroke, general - 690
Swimming, sychronized - 690
Swimming, treading water, fast/vigorous - 863
Swimming, treading water, moderate effort - 345

I swim mainly front crawl (freestyle) with some backstroke thrown in for variety. I also swim fairly vigorously so decided that my calories burned per hour would lie somewhere between 690 and 863 - I interpolated and came up with 780 (allowing for the fact that I weigh more than 190lbs and so will burn calories at a faster rate than in the table). Last night I swam for 45 minutes which gives a total calorie burn of 585. What I really wanted to do was to find out what this was equivalent to, in terms of steps walked (so I can see how swimming contributes to my target of 10,000 steps per day). Since one step burns 0.06 calories (I got this from my dietician and I've checked it against my pedometer and it's correct), then I can find the number of steps that my swim was equivalent to by dividing 585 by 0.06. Result? A whopping 9750 steps!

So, adding the steps equivalent and calories burned from the swim together with the normal walking I did at work yesterday, I 'walked' 13,500 steps and burned 800 calories. Since I only ate 880, I consumed a net calorie intake of just 80 calories yesterday!! No wonder I went below 15 stone for the first time this morning - 14 stone and 13 lbs. Fantastic.