Elliptical

neither...mfp is waaayyyy high, and machines tend to overestimate by at least 15%-20%...the only way to really tell is to get a heart rate monitor...

i would be on the elliptical for an hour and think i burned a bunch of calories (800+), once i got my hrm i realized i was wasting that hour as i wasnt getting my heart rate up enough to do any good and was maybe hitting like 450-500 cals

both numbers are too high...average cals burned is 7-8 a minute....going 60 minutes there is no way you are going at a real fast pace so you are probably burning 6-7 a minute

60 minutes on the elliptical is better than nothing but you could use your time much better and get better results by limiting elliptical to 15-20 minutes and doing something hard for 15-20 minutes like lifting some weights

I use a Nike Fuelband to determine what my calorie burn should be. It's not as accurate as a heart rate monitor but it is definitly more accurate then the machine and whatever MFP uses to determine what the calorie burn should be. I try not to eat back all my calories I burn, some but not all. I try to leave at least 200 - 300 calories on the board at the end of the day.

MFP calories are generally higher than actual calories burned. And I would say eat back some of the calories you burned off in order to sustain yourself. you shouldnt make your calorie deficit too high, it is dangerous

how is it dangerous? i went on a 40 mile bike ride, burning over 3000 calorie just on that 4hr ride, and i only ate like 2800 over the course of the entire day nothing bad happened at all and i was just a little hungrier than normal the next day.

the REDSKINS, however, are dangerous this year! HTTR!!!

"hail!" fellow redskins fan here, living in ny.

and to make the post relevant to mfp, i wouldn't say a huge deficit once in a while would be bad for you. i think it would kind of even out over a few days or a week or so. but i think if you have huge deficits for a sustained period of time, it might be bad for you.

Huge deficits maintained over too long of a time frame could leave your body turning to other sources for energy - it'll use some of the stored fats while it can, but with too many byproducts of fat metabolism in the blood stream, the body will then turn to muscle for energy.. definitely not a desired thing!

You probably won't run into any issues from a huge one or two day deficit, but too much of pretty much anything is a bad thing.

That said, it would behoove you to throw in some weights once in a while if you do mostly cardio - resistance and cardiovascular training pretty much synergize one another in ways.

As far as machines and calorie burn readouts.. for my own logging purposes I always take the number and chop off 20%. I know there's no good way I actually burned 904 calories in 48 minutes yesterday doing cardio - yes I did 48 minutes of intervals, and they were HARD, but I'm not sure 18.8 cal/min is even possible for a 176lb individual.

I heard once that MFP exersize calories are so high because they also count the calories your body burns naturally, without doing anything..but im not sure!! And YES, you are supposed to eat back your exersize calories, because MFP already has you at a calorie deficit, so if you eat them back youd still be eating at that deficit...

Wouldn't all calorie counts count what you were burning during that time? i don't think machines or hrms subtract the bmr from the reading, its the calories you are burning right then no matter what...