"Gross" and "Net" calories *burned*?

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animemoon5
animemoon5 Posts: 55 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
I was wondering about this in the back of my mind for awhile, and I see very little information about it.... I'm talking about Gross and Net calories burned. How many people here actually separate the two of them, and count only the "Net" burned calories?

And how does MyFitnessPal handle this? When I burn 300 calories from an activity in one hour.... it shows I "Earned" 300 calories.... But is that gross or net ? Because if I'm relying on accuracy of numbers , if a large portion of those numbers are calories I'd burn throughout the day anyways, then at some point it's going to start interfering with my weight loss...

If my BMR states I burn 2048 per day doing nothing, body at rest than 2048/24 = roughly 85 calories burned per hour from doing absolutely nothing. That can equal 1/3 of these exercises I'm doing...

Can anyone share any input, advice or thoughts on this subject? Is this something commonly known that I just totally missed somehow, or is it something that isn't usually taken into consideration and gets brushed off? Should I be concerned?

Replies

  • admmommy
    admmommy Posts: 143 Member
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    I am curious about the same thing.
  • TeashaLorna
    TeashaLorna Posts: 8 Member
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    Interesting, I am wondering about this to. Hopefully someone will chime in that can provide some insight. Thanks for posting.
  • elorawood
    elorawood Posts: 68 Member
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    Hi,

    I only log net calories burned. The ones they show you here on MFP are estimated really high and gross calories.

    I made my own personal Exercise Tabs (--> Exercise, My Exercise, Create Exercise) - they all say ¨NET¨ on it (to make it easier for me to find them again).

    Here is a good article that explains the difference between gross and net calories:
    http://www.shapesense.com/fitness-exercise/articles/net-versus-gross-calorie-burn.aspx

    Here is a calculator that will tell you what the net calories burned is if you have your gross calories (from a machine at the gym for example):
    http://www.shapesense.com/fitness-exercise/calculators/net-versus-gross-calorie-burn-conversion-calculator.aspx

    On the same site you can find an ¨Activity Based Calorie Burn Calculator¨ (also calculates the gross cals, but you can use that number with the net calculator - check the link, easier to understand then :) I may overcomplicated it here a little) - that was where I got my numbers from to create my own MPF Exercises - they are much more realistic and also more personal because you have to put in your own height, weight, age etc... I now have a HRM and at least the things that I can calculate with it are really close to the ones they told me on that site (only 10-20 cal difference).

    Hope this helps.
  • kborton1122
    kborton1122 Posts: 914 Member
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    Bump

    Great info elorawood!
  • animemoon5
    animemoon5 Posts: 55 Member
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    Hi,

    I only log net calories burned. The ones they show you here on MFP are estimated really high and gross calories.

    I made my own personal Exercise Tabs (--> Exercise, My Exercise, Create Exercise) - they all say ¨NET¨ on it (to make it easier for me to find them again).

    Here is a good article that explains the difference between gross and net calories:
    http://www.shapesense.com/fitness-exercise/articles/net-versus-gross-calorie-burn.aspx

    Here is a calculator that will tell you what the net calories burned is if you have your gross calories (from a machine at the gym for example):
    http://www.shapesense.com/fitness-exercise/calculators/net-versus-gross-calorie-burn-conversion-calculator.aspx

    On the same site you can find an ¨Activity Based Calorie Burn Calculator¨ (also calculates the gross cals, but you can use that number with the net calculator - check the link, easier to understand then :) I may overcomplicated it here a little) - that was where I got my numbers from to create my own MPF Exercises - they are much more realistic and also more personal because you have to put in your own height, weight, age etc... I now have a HRM and at least the things that I can calculate with it are really close to the ones they told me on that site (only 10-20 cal difference).

    Hope this helps.

    Fantastic! Thank you! ^_^ That answers my questions perfectly!

    Also as another random thought.. I've been wondering about... HRM's have been said to be accurate... I'm wondering where those come in between Gross/Net calories.... I'm wondering, since HRM's go by "Elevated" heart rates... and therefore being above and beyond what is "Normal" that perhaps those calories burned are considered "Net" ? Or should I be deducting from those numbers as well?
  • elorawood
    elorawood Posts: 68 Member
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    @animemoon - I use this calculator:
    http://www.shapesense.com/fitness-exercise/calculators/heart-rate-based-calorie-burn-calculator.aspx
    since my HRM only records the BPM & time but doesn´t calculate the calories for me. This calculator is a gross calculator. I don´t know how it works with the different types of HRMs - I can only speak for mine and actually have several questions about that one as well (still new to me :p )

    @Pu - it´s just to make it a bit more accurate - to have a better idea what we can eat (or dink :p) back without having to worry. Besides - I think we women worry more about this and are a lot more paranoid than most man are :) So the more information we have, the better we will feel about it.
    (Also, I don´t think that you would burn those 120 calories just from the heart rate to come down again - my heart rate just needs a few minutes to come down from 160 to normal - no way it would burn that many calories - I wish :) )
  • animemoon5
    animemoon5 Posts: 55 Member
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    I just thought I'd share, after re-calculating things, and adjusting for *Net* calories burned, using the shapesense.com calculator.... There is a 700 calorie difference in calories burned for the week, just switching from Gross to Net calories burned! When my weight loss goal is a slow and steady 1lb/week 3500 calorie deficit... that 700 calories takes up too huge of a chunk for me not to take into consideration...

    Also using that same site, I see I may have had some of my calculations off.... This alters my calories burned by another 500... all in all I burned about 1200 calories less than I thought.... My weight loss started slowing down as I started relying more heavily on exercise, and this might be why I'm thinking....

    The next couple of weeks I'm going to switch to counting net calories burned only, and see if I notice any major differences... it's certainly worth a try....

    Thanks everyone for the feedback and input! =)
  • castelluzzo99
    castelluzzo99 Posts: 313 Member
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    Just read the article that answered the op, and then the whole thread, and my opinion is that the closer you are to your goal weight, the more likely you are to need to pay attention to net calories. This is because you are typically working with a smaller deficit at 10 lb from goal than at 100 lb from goal.

    But so many things can affect calories burned! I just learned about VO2max on the same site, and now I understand why we can plateau with an exercise if we do not increase the intensity.
  • bound4beauty
    bound4beauty Posts: 274 Member
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    If you are using MFP to calculate the calories you should eat and then eat back your exercise calories, how confident are you that the number of calories it estimates you burn is accurate?
  • chezjuan
    chezjuan Posts: 747 Member
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    Fantastic! Thank you! ^_^ That answers my questions perfectly!

    Also as another random thought.. I've been wondering about... HRM's have been said to be accurate... I'm wondering where those come in between Gross/Net calories.... I'm wondering, since HRM's go by "Elevated" heart rates... and therefore being above and beyond what is "Normal" that perhaps those calories burned are considered "Net" ? Or should I be deducting from those numbers as well?

    When I first got my HRM, I used the ShapeSense heart rate-based calculator to double-check the calories that the monitor said I burned. The numbers lined up pretty well during my tests - usually within 20 calories. Since the ShapeSense heart rate calculator shows gross calories, that is what my HRM is also showing. Now that I feel that the HRM calorie count is accurate enough for me, I just use the ShapeSense net calorie calculator with the HRM calorie count to determine net calories.

    Since I am at maintenance right now, I use net calories to try to be closer to my daily goal as I have a low margin for error if I were to regularly overestimate exercize.
  • BflSaberfan
    BflSaberfan Posts: 1,272
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    Why not work out for an extra 10 minutes and not log it then?
  • eedson
    eedson Posts: 1 Member
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    BflSaberfan wrote: »
    Why not work out for an extra 10 minutes and not log it then?

    Lol, yea. Do that. (Rolls eyes).

    Or... why not work out an extra 10 mins and just log it correctly instead of guessing?
  • calamus77
    calamus77 Posts: 1 Member
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    Old article at this point, but I know for the walking exercises MFP is calculating the gross calories burned based on my last recorded weight, etc. I'm walking about 45 miles per week and both my desk treadmill and MFP give me approximately the same amount of estimate for the time I walk...and based on calculations at other sites that explicitly tell you which number they are calculating, both are giving me the gross value. So, now I just take my gross calories from the treadmill, do a net calorie conversion from the ShapeSense site, and then change the MFP calories to the NET value I retrieved.

    For me the difference between gross and net calories burned is about 400-600 calories per day since I'm walking all day, so it's not something you can just ignore. I wish they did the net conversion for me since it is a bit of a pain to do the net conversion manually every day.
  • GorillaType2
    GorillaType2 Posts: 1 Member
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    It's an epic fail of MFP that activities are added in gross calories. People will over eat the BMR calories of those activities! Really annoying to even have to digg into this..
  • thinbybday
    thinbybday Posts: 32 Member
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    I calculate estimated NET calories burned based on my heart rate. If I do GROSS calories and eat them back, I gain weight. (I weigh in the 130s and the minimum calories is 1200, so I don’t have a lot of margin of error.) I’ve successfully lost and kept off about 45 pounds this way.

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