Is It Possible to Have a Negative Net Calorie Count Daily?
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Possible? Only if you're 100% certain you burned that much. Healthy? Not at all.0
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lemonsnowdrop wrote: »
Three hours of exercise and an hour of walking is quite a bit. I know MFP overestimates, but 700 calories seems like a low estimate especially with all the swimming unless the OP is very small.0 -
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lemonsnowdrop wrote: »
Three hours of exercise and an hour of walking is quite a bit. I know MFP overestimates, but 700 calories seems like a low estimate especially with all the swimming unless the OP is very small.
Sorry, but unless you're a long distance runner, heavy weight lifter etc, I have a hard time believing that someone burned 1400 calories, especially when they were values given by MFP. Maybe not 700, but not nearly 1400.
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From what I've heard now, exercise seems to only count for about half of what it's truly logged in to MFP as.
In general MFP calculatiosn are accurate. But, logging exercise is usually not accurate. Let's say you swim for one hour. How much of it was actually swimming, how much was it resting. And how do you judge the "effort" which appears to be how MFP decides how many calories you have burned? It is very easy to e.g. log as 1 hour swimming what in fact was 30 minutes swimming, 30 minutes rest between laps. And it is also very easy to judge as vigorous effort what someone else would call relaxed swimming. I am not saying you did make any of these mistakes, it could be you actually did burn as much as MFP tells you, but it is very easy to overestimate a lot calories burned.0 -
I don't know much about swimming, but the MFP numbers on cycling seem to match pretty well with other sources, plus cycling is really easy to track. If she went 11 miles in an hour, Livestrong gives 418 calories for that for someone who's 155lbs, and bicycling.com and MFP give 422 calories in the hour.lemonsnowdrop wrote: »lemonsnowdrop wrote: »
Three hours of exercise and an hour of walking is quite a bit. I know MFP overestimates, but 700 calories seems like a low estimate especially with all the swimming unless the OP is very small.
Sorry, but unless you're a long distance runner, heavy weight lifter etc, I have a hard time believing that someone burned 1400 calories, especially when they were values given by MFP. Maybe not 700, but not nearly 1400.0 -
I think 1400 calories is totally doable based on the exercise. I bike hard for about an hour a day and can get around 1000 calories based on my Polar HRM. My resting heart is right at 50 bpm and I sustain 165 to 170 bpm for just about the entire hour minus the warm up and cooldown. And swimming is brutal when it comes to calorie burning.0
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It would have to be continuous working out. Two hours of continuous swimming, two hours of continuous cycling, etc.0
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Actually I burn about that in one 90 minute session of martial arts. Actually 2 hours but I only log 90 minutes.lemonsnowdrop wrote: »I have a really hard time believing you burned 1400 calories in one day, unless your session was like five hours long.
OP that did happen to me once. It was one of my dojo days and I ended up with a negative number for my net calories. It is not something would purposely do on a regular basis.
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The exercise was all continuous for each respective exercise. (I swam all at once, biked all at once, etc.)0
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Few people net more than ten calories per minute.0
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As far as my logging for exercises, I have a computer on my bike which tracked my time and average speed, I never stopped swimming laps between my 2 hours of swimming (it was completely continuous), and the walking was about 65 minutes (but I only logged 60).0
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I'm about 5'8" and 205 pounds if that helps at all. Thank you to everyone for informing me!0
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Lap swimming, moderate effort, has a MET of 5.8
so 5.8 * weight in kg * hours = approximate burn (METs are based on averages)
The same data file from my bike computer can produce over 700 calorie variances in different apps.0 -
theresaTerriM wrote: »LeanButNotMean44 wrote: »
Serious? Wow, I just got onto MFP and was curious if they under or overestimated. So what's a good way to count calorie burn? I would hate to start logging my exercises today and think I'm burning more than I actually am! No bueno, yikes....
I log 5 cal/min for light exercise up to 10 cal/min for all-out work.0 -
brianpperkins wrote: »Few people net more than ten calories per minute.
By that calculation, I would have burned 3,000 calories. Even if I only burned half of that it would be accurate to say that I burned 1,400 calories. (5 hours equals 300 minutes, multiplied by 10 equals 3,000 calories).0 -
brianpperkins wrote: »Few people net more than ten calories per minute.
By that calculation, I would have burned 3,000 calories. Even if I only burned half of that it would be accurate to say that I burned 1,400 calories. (5 hours equals 300 minutes, multiplied by 10 equals 3,000 calories).
If you could go at the level to net 10 calories per minute for five hours, you would be on Sports Center every night.0 -
So, the take away from all of this is to basically count the MFP calories burned by as much as half. Or log less time for each exercise to gain a better count of what's actually burned. And then round down and not up.
That's what I'm basically getting from all of this myself as well... lol
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According to BikeCalculator.com, a 175-pound individual riding a 30-pound bicycle at 11 mph will burn 179 calories in one hour, on a flat course with no wind. (I have no idea how much the OP weighs; I just picked a number out of a hat.) It requires 52 watts of power.
11 mph is still slow enough that wind resistance isn't the major factor; rolling resistance will dominate, so with heavy or overinflated tires, the calorie burn might be somewhat higher.
Once you get above 12 mph, wind resistance becomes much more important, and the calorie burn increases. Double the wattage from 52 to 104 and you'll be going 15 mph and burning 358 calories/hour. Add another 52, to 156 watts, and you'll go 17.7 mph and burn 537 calories/hour.
By the way, when bicycling on flat terrain, the rider weight doesn't matter that much. It's frontal cross section that matters, especially at higher speeds or with a headwind.
To answer the original question: Yes, it is possible to have negative net calories. I've done so once in the two years and three months I've been on MFP: On October 13, 2013, I ate 3260 calories, but I burned 4284 (estimated by my Garmin Edge 800 GPS cycle computer, which uses heart rate, fitness level, speed, and altitude changes to estimate energy expenditure). That was on an 9-hour (moving time), 111.5-mile bike ride up and down the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. I just couldn't eat that much.
However, I had carb loaded for a couple days before the ride, and I made up the excess deficit over the next several days. It is not sustainable to regularly have negative net calories. Even regularly having a low positive net is a very bad idea unless you're under strict medical supervision, with the possible exception of intermittent fasting.0 -
This used to happen to me when I burned more exercise calories than I consumed.0
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brianpperkins wrote: »Few people net more than ten calories per minute.
This is what my fitbit transferred over to mfp yesterday. Who the F Knows how correct it is...
This is for 170 active minutes
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Made a suggestion to MFP to get rid of that default calorie burn number.0
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How are you not hungry after all that exercise? I know some people aren't affected until the next day or day after, but I'd be ready to pounce a moose (or a Blizzard from DQ).0
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According to BikeCalculator.com, a 175-pound individual riding a 30-pound bicycle at 11 mph will burn 179 calories in one hour, on a flat course with no wind. (I have no idea how much the OP weighs; I just picked a number out of a hat.) It requires 52 watts of power.
11 mph is still slow enough that wind resistance isn't the major factor; rolling resistance will dominate, so with heavy or overinflated tires, the calorie burn might be somewhat higher.
Once you get above 12 mph, wind resistance becomes much more important, and the calorie burn increases. Double the wattage from 52 to 104 and you'll be going 15 mph and burning 358 calories/hour. Add another 52, to 156 watts, and you'll go 17.7 mph and burn 537 calories/hour.
By the way, when bicycling on flat terrain, the rider weight doesn't matter that much. It's frontal cross section that matters, especially at higher speeds or with a headwind.
To answer the original question: Yes, it is possible to have negative net calories. I've done so once in the two years and three months I've been on MFP: On October 13, 2013, I ate 3260 calories, but I burned 4284 (estimated by my Garmin Edge 800 GPS cycle computer, which uses heart rate, fitness level, speed, and altitude changes to estimate energy expenditure). That was on an 9-hour (moving time), 111.5-mile bike ride up and down the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. I just couldn't eat that much.
However, I had carb loaded for a couple days before the ride, and I made up the excess deficit over the next several days. It is not sustainable to regularly have negative net calories. Even regularly having a low positive net is a very bad idea unless you're under strict medical supervision, with the possible exception of intermittent fasting.
You're my new hero. I just got into cycling and only aspire to do that much! My fiance is a cycling freak, and I don't know if he could even do that ride. Wow.
Sorry, off topic, just wanted to say that
Great info, btw!!0 -
The hunger didn't hit me until today. Should I eat over my calorie goal a tad to balance it all out?0
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christinev297 wrote: »brianpperkins wrote: »Few people net more than ten calories per minute.
This is what my fitbit transferred over to mfp yesterday. Who the F Knows how correct it is...
This is for 170 active minutes
Your exercise calories are not just factored from the 170 active minutes but from all of the steps that you took (which is a lot!).0 -
Not something you want to do on a regular basis. I have done it, usually on Wednesdays when I train with my trainer, walk 3 miles at lunch and hit boot camp at night. It helps offset my rest days that I eat at my Maintenance calories.0
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christinev297 wrote: »brianpperkins wrote: »Few people net more than ten calories per minute.
This is what my fitbit transferred over to mfp yesterday. Who the F Knows how correct it is...
This is for 170 active minutes
Your exercise calories are not just factored from the 170 active minutes but from all of the steps that you took (which is a lot!).
I just posted this over on the fitbit group page. I dont want to derail this thread. It just gets mighty confusing regarding which actual numbers i'm supposed to be following...
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christinev297 wrote: »christinev297 wrote: »brianpperkins wrote: »Few people net more than ten calories per minute.
This is what my fitbit transferred over to mfp yesterday. Who the F Knows how correct it is...
This is for 170 active minutes
Your exercise calories are not just factored from the 170 active minutes but from all of the steps that you took (which is a lot!).
I just posted this over on the fitbit group page. I dont want to derail this thread. It just gets mighty confusing regarding which actual numbers i'm supposed to be following...
Yeah, that's a good question. I have only been using my fitness tracker for a little over a month and even though I'm pretty good with nutrition and exercise, I get a bit lost on which numbers to follow and what are "good" numbers for losing weight, etc.0
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