About how many calories am I ACTUALLY burning at Zumba?

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breefoshee
breefoshee Posts: 398 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
So right now I am eating 1500 calories a day. I'm 5'6, f, 225lbs and aside from Zumba, I'm sedentary. I've read a lot about how a lot of calorie burn estimates are incorrect. The calorie burn estimate for my 1 hour of zumba is anywhere between 600-1000 depending on how hard I worked.

Basically, I'm trying to figure out how much I should eat on those days. After workouts I've been crazy hungry and wanting to have a late night binge. Last night, I ate some eggs, beans and a tortilla for about 275 calories and I felt satisfied, but I had already eaten dinner before Zumba and that put me over my 1500 calorie goal.


Thoughts? Any way to guess how many calories I can eat on a Zumba day?

Replies

  • callsitlikeiseeit
    callsitlikeiseeit Posts: 8,627 Member
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    when i used to do it (at...250 ish pounds maybe and 5'1), i logged it as 400. better safe than sorry.
  • jjpptt2
    jjpptt2 Posts: 5,650 Member
    edited May 2018
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    Hard to say, but I would think 5 cals per minute would be a reasonable starting estimate.

    Oh, and in before the hair splitting...
  • lucerorojo
    lucerorojo Posts: 790 Member
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    When I was about 220 lbs. I started doing zumba once a week. I just used what MFP gave me for zumba, which I think was about 900 calories. I ate back ALL my exercise calories when I was losing at 2 lbs. per week. I had no trouble losing. You can just log what MFP says and then eat 50% or whatever you feel satisfied with. I think that 250 calories extra is no problem, you will still lose.

    Now, I'm at 191 (my SW was 237) and have just started to eat back only a portion of my exercise calories. I'm supposed to be losing 1 lb. per week and it's been more like .5-.75 now.
  • lolly2414
    lolly2414 Posts: 186 Member
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    I don't know how much you're actually burning, but with most exercise I log on here, I assume I only burned about half of what mfp says I burned. I rarely eat back any exercise calories because of this, unless I had an extremely active day of calorie burning.
  • summpear
    summpear Posts: 77 Member
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    I think a lot depends on your exertion. I do Zumba and my HR barely cracks 120 (I'm also incredibly bad at it... that doesn't help me!) But i can sustain 140-170 in a spin class the same length. Per my Garmin with HR monitor, I burn about 200 calories at Zumba but 5-600 at spin for an hour.
  • breefoshee
    breefoshee Posts: 398 Member
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    Thanks Everyone! I'm thinking I'll start eating half and see what my progress is like. I just don't want to fall into crazy binge patterns from not eating enough calories... but then I don't want to overeat and not reach my goals. The only way to see is to try, I guess!
  • heybales
    heybales Posts: 18,842 Member
    edited May 2018
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    ^^^^ This.

    Besides the fact you become better at the movement, more efficient, and therefore burn less.
    That is the type of workouts where it's hard to increase the intensity to make up for it becoming easier to do, most are done to the beat of the music, so not possible to swing faster.

    Not as easy as just adding weight to the bar, or increasing the pace or speed on treadmill or bike, or resistance, ect.

    Study says.... Huh, could have sworn I saw Zumba in here before, perhaps I'm thinking of Curves.
    Perhaps you can find the entry that sounds the closest to your level of effort and way the class is done.

    https://sites.google.com/site/compendiumofphysicalactivities/Activity-Categories/conditioning-exercise

    To use that column for METS to calculate calories:
    Find your BMR on MFP apps section.
    Divide by 1440 for a per minute burn rate.

    METS x minutes of workout x BMR/min = workout calories.

    ETA - found it:
    https://sites.google.com/site/compendiumofphysicalactivities/Activity-Categories/new-activity-updates
    6.5 - 7.3 METS - from a 2011 study with measured calorie burn by participants.
  • Francl27
    Francl27 Posts: 26,372 Member
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    It really depends on the Zumba too... and how good you are.
    summpear wrote: »
    I think a lot depends on your exertion. I do Zumba and my HR barely cracks 120 (I'm also incredibly bad at it... that doesn't help me!) But i can sustain 140-170 in a spin class the same length. Per my Garmin with HR monitor, I burn about 200 calories at Zumba but 5-600 at spin for an hour.

    I used HR monitor for both and I burned maybe 250 calories an hour spinning, and did about 350 at Zumba, but that was a long time ago... (I stopped spinning. Wasn't worth my time).

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