Calculating calories burned through walking

elaineamj

I'm curious. In another thread, @sunparakeet mentioned that some studies showed a calculation for how many calories burned through walking.

Your weight x .57 is how many calories you burn per mile.

Today, I walked 2.61 miles and runtastic gave me 175 calories burned (very similar to MFP numbers). I am 142 lbs currently and this formula gave me 211 calories burned.

I have been using a lot of walking for my exercise (typically 45-60 mins, 5 days a week) and eat back all my exercise calories. I supplement that with mild HIIT cardio videos 3-4 days a week and let MFP give me a generous estimate of 278 cals for 40 mins (I know - that's prob a bit high).

I have been dropping weight fairly quickly, currently averaging about 1.9lbs/week when I have MFP set for 1lb/week. My loss has actually increased since I started eating all my exercise calories instead of just half (I was dropping an avg 1.5lbs /week). Thinking about it, this coincided with an increase in my walking from 2-3 days a week to 4-5 days a week.

Could it be because of my walking calculations?

blues4miles

Interesting. I am having the opposite problem. Math says I should have lost more weight than I did in the last 3 weeks. I was using MFP #'s for my walks and wondering if it overestimates.

I think that .57 multiplier is including your BMR? And since MFP includes your BMR someone on some other thread somewhere was talking about a .33 multiplier for walking instead. Since that would subtract the calories you would have burned 'at rest' and give MFP good numbers.

But none of this explains why your losses are increasing. Could also just be weight loss is not linear. Maybe this is all weight you should have lost before you increased your calories and for whatever reason your body is just now letting go of it. I'd try to stick to a single method for about 3 weeks and see what happens at the end of that 3 weeks.

elaineamj

@sunparakeet That certainly would explain a lot of weight loss plateaus I've seen reported

blues4miles wrote: »

Interesting. I am having the opposite problem. Math says I should have lost more weight than I did in the last 3 weeks. I was using MFP #'s for my walks and wondering if it overestimates.

I think that .57 multiplier is including your BMR? And since MFP includes your BMR someone on some other thread somewhere was talking about a .33 multiplier for walking instead. Since that would subtract the calories you would have burned 'at rest' and give MFP good numbers.

But none of this explains why your losses are increasing. Could also just be weight loss is not linear. Maybe this is all weight you should have lost before you increased your calories and for whatever reason your body is just now letting go of it. I'd try to stick to a single method for about 3 weeks and see what happens at the end of that 3 weeks.

Very true - and I've been also reminding myself to have patience before switching stuff. I switched to eat all my exercise calories 2 weeks ago - should hit my 3 weeks by Friday. I am continuing to watch trendweight and will wait until I get a full 3 weeks of data.

I have been theorizing that because I have more calories to play with and feel less restricted that when I have to estimate calories, I overestimate more now than I did before. I am pretty careful about weighing and logging 80-90% of the time - but there are 2-4 meals/snacks a week where I estimate (meals out, office treats, etc). Still, I cannot imagine I am overestimating to the tune of 300-500 calories a day. (trendweight says I am burning almost 500 calories more per day than my plan).

@blues4miles Have you tried comparing the formula above to your MFP numbers? To see if it is more or less?

blues4miles

elaineamj wrote: »

@blues4miles Have you tried comparing the formula above to your MFP numbers? To see if it is more or less?

I usually clock my walks at 2.5 mph and MFP gives me ~280 for the time it takes me to complete 3 miles. The .57 calc above would make that 324. It's possible if I selected 3 mph it would give me a closer #, perhaps it considers 2.5 a slow, ambling pace.

I started to use the .33 x lbs x mile calc for the last week or so (171 cals for 3 miles) but I am not taking my own advice as this week I am trying my spouse's UP3 (Jawbone fitness tracker) so it is feeding calories directly into MFP. It already gave me around 500 extra calories for ~9600 steps which seems like a REALLY high estimate. Yes I put myself as sedentary, but if I were to increase to lightly active than MFP would just give me more calories. And according to my math I am either a) retaining water b) logging my food incorrectly, undercounting or c) overcounting exercise. So I have no idea what's going on. I am losing weight...just not as fast as the math says I should. I would like to think it's water retention or overcounting exercise, because I think I can deal with those. But I suppose logging food poorly is just as likely.

So that was a big ol' paragraph to say I don't even know what I'm doing now on logging my walking. I'm not happy with any of the numbers I've used lately. 171 for 3 miles seems pretty low. But the math on 300 wasn't working out.

The good news for me is I'm still in weight loss mode so I'm not trying to figure out maintenance anytime soon so the exercise numbers don't need to be super precise. But I still wish I had a better handle on what's going on.