Joining gym, eat calories or not?

knowleka

I am joining a gym, question is do i eat back the calories there as i won't have a way to know what i have burned. I don't have a fitness tracker or anything and i am unsure if endomondo or the machine calories will be accurate or not. Advice needed please or should i just stick to my daily allowance and forget the gym cals? Thanks all

MeanderingMammal

Accuracy isn't really a differentiator, pretty much everything will give you an approximation, regardless of what people will say on here.

Pick a method of estimating, then stick with it. Track your progress and then adjust how much of the mesurement you actually then eat back to account for progress. If you're losing faster than planned, eat more, if slower than planned, eat a bit less.

In terms of whether to eat back or not, personally I do. I've lost consistently when I was, and I'm maintaining reasonably at the moment doing so. I run and cycle and use GPS based estimates.

sijomial

You don't need to know exactly - a consistent and somewhat reasonable estimate is fine.

I eat all mine as exercise performance and recovery is important to me, some of the methods I use are pretty accurate but some are far from accurate but I keep on track just fine.

daweasel

Yep, everything will be some kind of approximation, and it really depends on what you're doing. If you keep track of the deficit and corresponding weight changes you should get an idea.

That said, I would really, really caution against eating back all the calories if you're using MFP estimates or estimates from cardio machines at the gym. MFP estimates I find perhaps 20% higher, and cardio machines at the gym can be as much as double (not always, depends on the machine, and whether you can input your weight etc). Perhaps try limiting yourself to eating back about half of what it says as a starting point and see what happens.

When you think about it, 100 calories either way won't make a big difference so don't get too worried about things being an approximation. For a start, it's a tiny fraction of what you need to gain or lose say 1kg, but more importantly, your daily activity will probably vary at least that much. And food logging won't be 100% accurate either even if you're being quite careful.