Do i HAVE to eat the calories ive burned??

Before you eat your exercise calories, make sure they are accurate. This site is better than some but it still tells me I'm burning more calories in exercise than I actually am. Well, except for one thing I do where it says I'm burning less. :laugh:

But overall it wildly over-estimates my calories burned from exercise.

I am getting calories burned from the machines at the gym after i enter weight and age.

The machines at my gym are off too. They don't take into account what level you have the machine on. How lame is that?!

So ok, I'm going to hate myself later for posting in this topic, but .... can't.... stop.... typing.

Here's MHO.

The site asks you what you'd like to lose per week as a goal, it's a dumb tool, by that I mean it doesn't really check to see whether that goal is right for you, if you say you want to lose 2 lbs a week, it gives you a 2 lb a week deficit, it doesn't ask whether this is a realistic goal for you. That's up to you to decide. The only thing it does is makes sure your pre-exercise calories remains above the WHO recommended minimum for women (1200 calories).

Then the site helps you out by trying to keep you within the range that will get you to that goal, that means when you enter exercise calories, it will add those calories to how much you should eat a day, it does that because it's trying to keep you at your goal deficit. If you don't eat those calories, you risk falling outside that range. The body can only sustain a certain deficit before it starts to panic and think you're starving. When it does this, it begins slowing down your metabolic functions and storing fat in earnest, it also starts to canabalize lean tissue (muscle).
NOTE: it doesn't do this all at once, it takes 3 to 5 days for this to start happening, so you have a little leeway. Also good to note, the MORE fat you have, the bigger this deficit can be. So for someone with say, 80 lbs to lose, they can get by without eating most of their exercise calories because their body has so much extra energy stored, that it just doesn't see the starvation as an issue yet, but don't fool yourself, it eventually will, and the reason why we don't recommend doing it this way is because we aren't shooting for fast huge weight loss here, we're shooting for a long term healthy lifestyle, and that method is not sustainable, half the battle is learning to do this right, if you do, then when it comes down to that last 15 or 20 lbs, you'll have the knowledge of your body, and the tools and wisdom to keep going in a healthy way.

What you should do is get the knowledge, there are lots of good posts stickied in the general weight loss section, read them, they will give you lots and lots of good information, once you have armed yourself with that knowledge, you can make some informed decisions.

Side note, McMadame is right, the gym machines are a VERY rough estimate, they can be pretty far off. If you really want accuracy in your calories burned, buy an HRM with a chest strap or arm strap, they give you a far more accurate reading, polar, timex, body bug are all brand names for good HRM's. You can look some up on ebay or amazon and find a good one for under $100, IMHO best investment you'll ever make.

Hope this helps.

-Banks