Calorie Burn Count

I am seeing wildly varied calorie burn from some of these posts. There are a lot of different calorie counters out there, watches, heart rate monitors, exercise equipment, and they all seem to give us different reads. I have been exercising almost my entire adult life and I know pretty much that calorie count is usually overestimated by any and all devices, especially exercise aerobic equipment like bikes and treadmills.
Overestimating how much we burn in calories shoots us in the foot when trying to lose weight because we can blow a great workout with one snack or meal.

I have been looking at different charts and they all pretty much read the same and I think its a good guide to go by to see how accurate our workouts actually are.

I ride my peloton and I was getting frustrated because it seemed like I was working harder than the calorie burn was estimating. Turns out its about right - dang! Never the less, I can calculate more accurately now.

Here is a link to a good chart that could be a check in with what our devices are saying.

There will be another link to click after this one to get to the chart.

https://dhs.wisconsin.gov/publications/p4/p40109.pdf

Replies

Lietchi

So is that gross or net calories? Important distinction, especially for longer exercise sessions.

For running i like this calculator:
https://exrx.net/Calculators/WalkRunMETs
It actually shows that my Garmin underestimates my running calories (more and more with time, as I get fitter).

For cycling, I thinks watts are a good basis for calculating calorie burn (from reading on the boards, I don't cycle myself).

For other types of exercise it can be harder to get a good estimate, tables like that are definitely useful.

dvdiamond11

I am not sure of the distinction between gross and net, so I will look that up. Yes, as we get fitter the calorie burn goes down, so challenging oneself more will bring it back up if one chooses. Running is the granddaddy of calorie burn. I wish I enjoyed it. I used to force myself to run for a long time. I even had a running coach. Nothing I did brought enjoyment, just suffering! Haha!

I think my Peloton is pretty accurate now according to the table and that helps a lot. Weight lifting and resistance training is tricky, so underestimating there is a good idea.

Retroguy2000

dvdiamond11 wrote: »

I am not sure of the distinction between gross and net, so I will look that up... Weight lifting and resistance training is tricky, so underestimating there is a good idea.

If a machine says you burned 500 in an hour, and let's say that's accurate (lol), but you would have burned 100 sitting around doing nothing, you effectively burned 400 additional calories.

For my weights, I approximate with an MET of about 3.5 gross, which is listed somewhere as moderate intensity iirc. I see estimates as high as 6 MET for weights.

Lietchi

dvdiamond11 wrote: »

I am not sure of the distinction between gross and net, so I will look that up. Yes, as we get fitter the calorie burn goes down, so challenging oneself more will bring it back up if one chooses. Running is the granddaddy of calorie burn. I wish I enjoyed it. I used to force myself to run for a long time. I even had a running coach. Nothing I did brought enjoyment, just suffering! Haha!

Same bodyweight, mileage and pace means the same burn. My Garmin thinks I burn fewer calories though, because my heart rate is lower. Hence the whole reason I use that calculator, to have a more accurate idea 🙂

It took 3 attempts over a few decades for me to get into running 😆

kshama2001

Here's a good post from another thread:

AnnPT77 wrote: »

kshama2001 wrote: »

cwolfman13 wrote: »

No, but you can create an exercise and assign it a calorie amount. Also, eating back all of your exercise calories doesn't cancel anything out. You selected a goal of X Lbs per week loss and MFP gave you a calorie target WITHOUT exercise to accomplish that. Not accounting for exercise can create a deficit that is overly large and unhealthy.

If I tell MFP I want to lose 1 Lb per week I'll get a calorie target of 1900 (before exercise) which means MFP is estimating my maintenance calories (before exercise) to be 2400. Now lets say I exercise and burn 400 calories...I can eat those back and maintain the established deficit by eating 2300 calories because my maintenance number would have also increased to 2400+400=2,800. 2,800-2,300=500 calorie deficit still.

Yes, I created my own exercise for several activities.

I only use "Gardening, general" when I am doing something intense like digging with a shovel (as opposed to a trowel.) I created "Gardening, moderate" to use for less intense gardening.

I created "Classical Stretch" by averaging the calories given for "Stretching, hatha yoga" and "Calisthenics, home, light/moderate effort."

You do that here: https://www.myfitnesspal.com/exercise/new or after searching the exercise database and not finding what you're looking for.

@joemjr2 the calories at the gym might include your "just being alive" calories when what you want is just the intentional exercise calories on top of that. If you use values from MFP, what do you get? For example, compare the calories you get from the treadmill with MFP's "Walking, 3.0 mph, mod. pace" (or whatever speed you use.) If the treadmill is higher, use MFP.

Under the covers, MFP is using the METS method of estimating exercise calories, which is a research-based thing.

Another option for estimating calories for your own activities (using METS) is to see if researchers have estimated or calculated average METS for your exercise. This is a quite-comprehensive source:

https://sites.google.com/site/compendiumofphysicalactivities/home

With that information, you can either use the METS value to estimate calories (if you like math), or (if you don't like math) find an exercise in MFP's database that has a similar METS value to the research estimate for your activity.

Once you create a custom exercise with a calorie estimate, MFP will scale that estimate for you automagically each time you use your custom exercise, adjusting the calories based on the number of minutes you exercise and your currently-recorded body weight in MFP. (That is, you only need to go through the more complex steps in the preceding paragraph once per exercise type.)

As an aside, I'd mention that this is a good source for calorie estimates for walking/running - likely better than the MFP estimates - if you make it a point to select "net" in the energy box.

https://exrx.net/Calculators/WalkRunMETs

I used that thread and https://sites.google.com/site/compendiumofphysicalactivities/home?pli=1 and came up with a realistic value for the type of Tai Chi that I do. I also figured out that I was underestimating my walking/hiking and overestimating my yoga.

kshama2001

dvdiamond11 wrote: »

I am not sure of the distinction between gross and net, so I will look that up. Yes, as we get fitter the calorie burn goes down, so challenging oneself more will bring it back up if one chooses. Running is the granddaddy of calorie burn. I wish I enjoyed it. I used to force myself to run for a long time. I even had a running coach. Nothing I did brought enjoyment, just suffering! Haha!

I think my Peloton is pretty accurate now according to the table and that helps a lot. Weight lifting and resistance training is tricky, so underestimating there is a good idea.

I haven't run since I left the military and no one could force me to run anymore, and I don't see that changing

AnnPT77

dvdiamond11 wrote: »

I am seeing wildly varied calorie burn from some of these posts. There are a lot of different calorie counters out there, watches, heart rate monitors, exercise equipment, and they all seem to give us different reads. I have been exercising almost my entire adult life and I know pretty much that calorie count is usually overestimated by any and all devices, especially exercise aerobic equipment like bikes and treadmills.

The bolded is not true and IMO not helpful. Yeah, it's frequently true . . . but it's not systematically true, so claiming it's all overestimates doesn't seem very helpful.

Overestimating how much we burn in calories shoots us in the foot when trying to lose weight because we can blow a great workout with one snack or meal.

I have been looking at different charts and they all pretty much read the same and I think its a good guide to go by to see how accurate our workouts actually are.

I ride my peloton and I was getting frustrated because it seemed like I was working harder than the calorie burn was estimating. Turns out its about right - dang! Never the less, I can calculate more accurately now.

Here is a link to a good chart that could be a check in with what our devices are saying.

There will be another link to click after this one to get to the chart.

https://dhs.wisconsin.gov/publications/p4/p40109.pdf

This appears to be a METS-based estimate like what MFP is doing under the covers with its exercise database. (MFP has a flaw in how they do it IMU. The flaw has to do with the gross vs. net issue. The flaw matters more for long, low intensity exercise than it does for short, intense exercise.)

Kshama already provided links to the Compendium of Physical Activities, which includes all the information most anyone outside of researchers would need to understand how METS-based estimateing works. The reason most of the charts read the same is that they're all based on the same METS research, not because they're "right".

IMO, METS is an OK-ish way to estimate some exercises, and pretty poor for others. It can be poor for exercises in which calorie burn and body weight aren't tightly linked - i.e., things where moving one's body through space isn't creating the majority of the burn (maybe something like stationary bike, say).

It can be poor for exercises that don't have an objective intensity metric. Give a bit of a think to the ones in your linked chart that have subjective categorizations (like "vigorous", "moderate"). My cynical impression from talking to people in group classes is that one person's "vigorous" is another person's "light". That's subjective. In similar way, it matters whether the exercise has a wide band of efficiency differences between people, or not. (Sometimes being "inefficient" would burn more calories than being "efficient", besides.)

In something like running, calorie burn is more tightly correlated to body weight; many METS values for running are related to specific objective paces; and most humans are within reasonable spitting distance of the same efficiency (relatively speaking, compared to other activities where efficiency is widely varied). That gives METS better chances of being close for walking/running. (I use the calculator Lietchi linked. It uses METS under the covers, too, and has the plus of making gross vs. net explicit.)

Also, some of the underlying METS research is questionable IMO. Consider "Canoeing, rowing, >6 mph, vigorous effort". Speaking as someone who both canoes and rows, lumping those together with the same speed metric equated to the same calories . . . well, I don't think so.

Exercise calorie estimating is pretty fraught. (So is base calorie needs estimating. So is food logging. It's all estimates, all the way down.) It can still be workable, all of it.

Personally, I use different estimating methods for different exercise types, after giving some thought to which method is likely to come closest for that activity . . . and I admit, preferring the lowball method if there's no objective basis for preferring one method over another. When first starting to estimate exercise, whenever I could I would compare multiple methods of estimating the exercise calories, and try to understand how/why they differed before choosing what to use consistently. (Consistent estimates are more important than exact ones, IMO.)

dvdiamond11 wrote: »

I am not sure of the distinction between gross and net, so I will look that up. Yes, as we get fitter the calorie burn goes down, so challenging oneself more will bring it back up if one chooses. Running is the granddaddy of calorie burn. I wish I enjoyed it. I used to force myself to run for a long time. I even had a running coach. Nothing I did brought enjoyment, just suffering! Haha!

I think my Peloton is pretty accurate now according to the table and that helps a lot. Weight lifting and resistance training is tricky, so underestimating there is a good idea.

No, as we get fitter, the calorie burn doesn't go down, for the same exercise at the same objective intensity and same body weight. As we get fitter, that same exercise feels easier. As we get fitter, our body pumps more blood (so delivers more oxygen) per heartbeat, so our heart rate gets lower when doing the same exercise. (It's oxygen consumption that correlates somewhat closely with calorie burn; heart rate is just an imperfect proxy.) The calorie burn is mostly coming from the "work" of the exercise, in the physics sense of work. That work doesn't change just because it feels easier or our heart beats slower.

For strength training, I feel like METS estimates are the best of a bad set of options. (Heart rate tends to be terrible for strength training. IMU, even some fitness trackers now use METS estimating if they know that's the type of exercise you're doing.) Strength training is one case where I do use the MFP exercise database estimate. Since I do relatively short sessions not very often, I don't worry about the gross-to-net problem, figure it's lost in the noise of overall estimating error.

ETA: Would this thread have been better off in the Debate Club area?

Good topic, OP . . . but controversial.

dvdiamond11

I did not mean it to be controversial and it should not be debatable. Calorie burn is calorie burn no matter what way you get to it.
I thought it might be helpful for people to check their calorie burn to see if it is close to accurate. It only helps us to know. Overestimating calorie burn is common and its usually why people cannot seem to lose weight or get stuck.
A METS calculator is a great way to figure it out. You could also compare that to devices and get a truer value.
The chart I posted of course is just a generalization.