Calories burned accuracy - HELP!

Unfortunately, exercise machines -- even those that allow you to enter your personal information -- are notorious for giving inflated calorie burn estimates. I have found that most exercise machines over-state my calorie burn by hundreds of calories (depending on the duration, intensity, and activity). I have been going with my Fitbit Charge HR burns and either losing or maintaining as expected -- if it was giving me too low of a number (that is, if I was burning 500 calories on my treadmill run instead of the 200ish that Fitbit gives me), I'd be losing more weight than expected.

So I would go with my Fitbit, not the equipment.

If you can check your heart rate chart to make sure your fit-bit was reading your heart rate the whole time, wrist based HRM are notorious for missing some heart beats when moving on your arms. Now not know how much energy you are exerting while doing the exercise it's hard know if the numbers are right. According to my activity monitor I burned 621 calories doing 65 mins of vigorous keeping my heart rate above 80% this is including my BMR, it's 521 w/o BMR.

My elliptical said 650 cals burned doing 30mins (highest incline).

For an hour, yes very possible. For 30 minutes I would be asking which year you won the Tour de France.

I would definitely use your fit bit burn.

skyeashlee wrote: »

Thanks for the replies. Through obvious change of lifestyle - eating better and counting calories plus using my elliptical trainer religiously, I managed to lose 30kg....it took alot of commitment and lonnng sessions on the elliptical , so I feel pretty disheartened by the potential false info given from it...

Basically my elliptical has levels 1-16 , I always do it on level 16 at a fast pace which works out to be 20cals per minute....apparently...within 10-12mins am sweating and by the end am drenched...

So regular sessions would be:
30mins burn 650cal
42mins - 850cals
62mins - 1250cal
1hr40min - 2000-2050cals

I love my fitbit and of course want it to be most accurate but perhaps im in some kind of denial that the elliptical is substantially innacurate as I have been so loyal to it... it has been my core motivator and pushed me so far at times... well pretty much every day (

Any ideas on how I can experiment with the two to work out which is more true???

Based on your photo and profile being reasonably up to date, and assuming you aren't a complete cardio monster, the elliptical is giving you inflated calorie burns. But without specifics of your size, how fit you are, and the specifics of the machine manufacturer, it's really impossible to say.

If the machine allows programming for weight, it may also require an HRM for accurate measurements of calories burned. Some will default based on assumptions without that, and some with hand grip HRMs will default if you don't use them frequently enough. Combine that with machines often calculating BMR, and error will exist.

Some manufacturers will have information on how their calorie burns are calculated, some don't have such info available. But in either case in this example I'd say the FitBit is likely much more accurate. We own a commercial grade Precor elliptical, and at 180 lbs I have to do about 5 miles or more an hour to burn 650 calories. Since the Fitbit would break down the BMR and exercise in difference readouts, the Fitbit burn for that would probably be in the 560-570 range. But since calories per minute would still rely somewhat on both weight and fitness, I'll tell you now that on our machine I'd bet that very few people my size would sustain 20 calories a minute for a half hour. Even 15 calories a minute is pretty taxing, I want to say in the range of 12 METs.

But get some information, do some math, and figure out which is best. Regardless of which is more accurate, if the elliptical helped you lose weight it still worked. I have done through the same process with apps and trying to find accurate exercise logging methods. And I'm still trying to find apps that are even close, as some are great at one thing but suck at others. I guess in that sense they are similar to HRMs and wearable devices of all sorts.

Skyeashlee,
Before I answer your question, I want to say that I don't understand your angst: you are getting the results you want.

To answer your question:
If you can do an exercise session on a flight of stairs, it would be easy to check the FitBit.
Go up and up, or up and down for 10 minutes or so. Check you heart rate on the FitBit and manually when you finish the exercise

Measure the total height up in meters (height of one stair * number of stairs)
Multiply Height_up*9.8*Your_Weight_in_Kg = Joules of work
Multiply JoulesofWork * 5 (an estimate of body efficiency) = BodyWork
Divide BodyWork by 4184 = kCals expended

Compare this number to what the FitBit says. If both the energy calc and the heart rate numbers are close then believe the FitBit in the future.

Congrats on losing 30 Kg!

"Basically my elliptical has levels 1-16 , I always do it on level 16 at a fast pace ..."

Are these levels resistance to movement or the incline ?

ericGold15 wrote: »

"Basically my elliptical has levels 1-16 , I always do it on level 16 at a fast pace ..."

Are these levels resistance to movement or the incline ?

Resistance to movement if it has the handles.