Did I really burn that many calories???

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  • Hornsby
    Hornsby Posts: 10,322 Member
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    Sounds more like a net burn, but in 4.5 hours, you would have probably burned around 300-400 calories just by sitting on your butt. Taking that from the number MFP gave you and you probably will get a more realistic number. (200-300 cals)
  • tbrain1989
    tbrain1989 Posts: 280 Member
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    Also, remember that Calories are a metric of energy used.

    1 calorie is the energy required to heat 1 gram of water by 1 degree

    so food can be burned (literally) and how much water it heats up by 1 degree is the number of calories.

    Now change that for exercise and the metric is guestimation at best.

    lets take an apple at 80 calories (for example) that means that when set on fire an apple can heat 80 grams fo water by 1 degree.

    Now if one apple means you can walk for 1 hour then you know you burn 80 calories per hour whilst walking but without doing extreme starvation testing you couldnt test this and so many other factors come into play.

    if you ate 5000 calories and then did 5000 calories "worth of exercise" you wouldnt drop dead..

    a good rule of thumb is knock off 20% of the speculative calorie counts.

    or dont count exercise.
  • JoRocka
    JoRocka Posts: 17,525 Member
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    it doesn't seem that extreme honestly- walking around for almost 5 hours is work- even if you aren't working exceptionally hard.

    I rarely put in my full time working out- I throttle it back to what seems to be a more appropriate number- like if I put in 2 hours for dance- it would have me burning upwards 4-500- and I know it's not that much- so I'll usually put in 45 min- gives me 3-400 which is much more reasonable- then I eat back 50-75% of that.

    Over estimating workouts and underestimating food gets people into trouble- a lot- it's a very common problem.
    Over estimate food and underestimate workouts- will help push you more toward a deficit-
  • sarrah_n
    sarrah_n Posts: 192 Member
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    Sounds about right for the amount of time you were active.
  • spmcavoy1
    spmcavoy1 Posts: 60 Member
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    If I walk/run for an hour (avg. pace 4.5 mph) I burn close to 650 calories according to my HRM at 5'4" and 179 lbs. I'd say it's pretty accurate for how many calories you burned during the total of that period. BUT, because some of those are "Existence" calories, I'd say log half that amount.

    FWIW I only log 70% of my calories because I'd much rather under-estimate my calories than over-estimate.
  • mikeyrs
    mikeyrs Posts: 176 Member
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    Over estimating workouts and underestimating food gets people into trouble- a lot- it's a very common problem.
    Over estimate food and underestimate workouts- will help push you more toward a deficit-

    This! Most people don't realize that many of the calorie burns an HRM calculation yields may have otherwise been burned regardless of how strenuous a particular activity is stated to be. If you didn't break into a heavy sweat during that exercise, it wasn't a high-energy cardio excercise that burned up fat calories. So consider that exercise to be only normal day-to-day activity rather than true exercise that yields an honest calorie burn. As you become more fit, your resting heart rate will drop somewhat over time and make it more challenging for you to reach your magic fat burning zone. As a result, your actual calorie burn from any cardio fitness activity you do diminishes as you become more aerobically fit over time. The true long-term purpose of cardio is to strengthen your heart, not burn up fat.

    Also, be aware that body building exercises do not typically yield large calorie burns but they result in development of stronger and leaner muscle tissue that impacts TDEE. Developing your largest muscle groups will impact your TDEE significantly more in the long term than any single cardio exercise will. This is because muscle tissue consumes lots of energy even at rest while fat does not consume energy. In fact, fat is stored energy waiting to be consumed upon demand. Build your largest muscle groups to increase that energy demand.

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