True Calories Burned

I would definitely get an HRM with a chest strap that uses your own personal info in the future. This is much more accurate that any other method.

For this time, though, I would personally use the lower number. I would rather undercalculate exercise calories than overestimate them, just in case. After I purchased a good HRM and synced it with my Fitbit, I actually discovered that most machines and apps (including MFP) vastly overestimated all of my routines. For example, a 50 minute round of Turbo Kick only burns about 450 calories for me, but most apps and calculators online estimate closer to 600-700 calories burned! Imagine the frustration of eating those exercise calories and never losing weight, lol.

Neither is correct. There are no devices out there that can correctly determine calorie burn (yes, all these people on MFP can be wrong). The devices most here preach about only give you a very rough estimate. Not accurate enough to log if you are serious about tracking and losing weight. Don't let yourself get caught up with knowing what you are burning, just focus on what you are consuming. Get into an exercise routine (a real exercise routine and not just walking the dog) but don't worry about what you burn. If, like many, you like using them for motivation, great, so long as you realize that is their only benefit.

One of the least known bits of info about these "calories burned" trackers is that they include the amount of cals that your body would burn had you just been sleeping for that hour that you were actually running.

Ex. say you burn 90 cals per hour for 24 hrs as a base rate = 2160 cals total to maintain weight. Now lets say you ran for 1 hr and the tracker says you burned something like 400 cals. Well if you want to actually know the "extra" calories burned, you would need to deduct what your body would already be burning regardless. Therefore, in this example, only 310 "extra" calories were burned... not 400. It's important to know this but it's equally important to know that cal trackers are rough estimates and are more than likely wrong.

I see all kinds of posts on MFP that say someone has burned like 800 calories doing 45 mins of an exercise... that's actually physiologically impossible. If it were possible for the body to burn this much energy in less than 4% of a day then imagine how quickly our human ancestors would have died off trying to hunt food.

I agree with the other poster about focusing more on calories in than out. Just make sure it's below maintenance and you will lose the weight. Good luck!

P.S. your bike cals burned were probably more between 150 and 200 depending on level of intensity.

When I had my base MFP level set to Sedentary and logged all my exercise calories with a HRM where relevant and ate most of my exercise calories back, I would either stay the same weight or put on half a pound or so.

Since setting my base level to Light Active and not eating back any workout calories, I have been seeing a drop of about 1lb per week. I had obviously been trusting the HRM too much and not focussing on calories in.

What I would say though is I don't agree that you have to deduct your base calories from your HRM total if you are putting these figures into the MFP Exercise log - because MFP has already taken your base calories away from the total when you set up your personal details when you first joined. Unless someone can correct me on this one? Your base calorie expenditure has already been taken into account in the MFP calculations.

Did the stationary bike ask for your weight and height before you started? If not, I'd go with your app, coz it's programmed to your specifications and will calculate calories burned- not perfectly - but more accurately.

You can buy heart monitors/wrists watches that will calculate your calories burned more accurately too )

On a treadmill, or elliptical, this may be almost correct, but since a stationary bike remains stationary, your weight has no effect on caloric burn. Stationary bikes get their information based upon the resistance of force necessary to move the pedals. Since MFP doesn't account for the resistance, it's numbers will be more of a guess than the machines.