Calories Burned

Everyone has a different metabolic rate and this extremely accurate calculator tells you how many calories YOU are burning off in all types of exercise! This is the most accurate way on the internet to calculate how many calories you are burning in various activities. Why is it the most accurate? Most calculators use caloric values for the “average” person but the problem is that age, height, weight, and gender determine how many calories you burn off at a given activity. Unless you are of average height, average musculature, average bodyfat, and average age, your actual caloric burn will be significantly different than the average value. This calculator uses the revised Harris-Benedict equations or the Mifflin St Jeor equations to determine your metabolic rate and the METS value of the exercise to calculate a precise caloric burn.

Calories Burned

Why Accuracy Is Important

So whats the big deal about being accurate? This isnt rocket science, right? Its not like we are trying to put a man on the moon or anything. Think again. Hitting your caloric target is very important and it can be harder than it appears. Get too few calories and you canabalize muscle which is what a lot of the extreme diets do. A good rule of thumb is to avoid restricting your calories more than 25% below your maintenance calories. On the other extreme, if you get too many calories then you get fat. Consider this, for most people that caloric deficit will be only 400 calories a day. If you forget to count the calories in the four tablespoons of cream in your coffee and the three tablespoons of mayo on your sandwich and the four pats of butter on your toast – there goes your entire 400 calories. Similarly, if you give yourself too much “caloric credit” for your exercise done, you can easily error by 400 calories. Very often, people over-report the exertion level of their cardio. THIS is why accuracy is important! We are trying to hit a very specific caloric target that allows us to lose fat while either gaining muscle or maintaining muscle mass. To make this calculator the most accurate one around, it does the following:

• Rather than using the metabolic rate of an average person, this calculator uses your metabolic rate by calculating it using either Harris-Benedict equations or Mifflin St. Jeor equations.
• Uses METs correction factor
• Calculates calories actually burned by the exercise rather than energy used during the exercise (see below section)

Why is the difference between calories burned *while* exercising and calories burned *by* the exercise so important?

Huh? Say what? This is really important and all the exercise calculators out there get this wrong. Its at the core of why a lot of people “cant lose weight”, its because they double-count their calories burned! Lets take Homer Simpson for example (5’11” 285 pounds), he wants to lose weight so he calculates his resting metabolic rate to be 2228 calories, so far so good. Then he calculates how many calories burned by his “exercise” which is 8 hours of TV watching. He goes to a calories burned calculator and see that in 8 hours he burns 1087 calories watching TV so he (incorrectly) calculates his total daily energy expenditure to be 3315 calories (2228 + 1087). He then decreases that by 10% and sets his daily caloric target for 2983 calories (90% of 3315) so he can lose weight, but guess what, he GAINS weight! Does he have a slow metabolism? Does he have metabolic syndrome? NO! He is doing the same thing that millions of others do and has double counted the calories burned! Remember that 1087 calories burned *during* the TV watching? Well, in that 8 hours of TV watching only 344 calories were burned *by* the increased brain activity caused by watching TV, the other 743 calories would have been burned anyway if he was sleeping. That 743 calories is the from the resting metabolic rate and he already counted that in his 2228 calories RMR!! Lets calculate Homer’s caloric target correctly, you can do it one of two ways:

• Calculate calories burned during the day by starting with your Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) and then add the calories burned *by* each activity you participate in during your waking hours
• Calculate your calories burned during the day by ignoring your Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) and then add the calories burned *during* each activity you participate in during the day, including sleeping. If you use this method, its important that your activities total to 24 hours.

So Homer was trying to use the first method but goofed and added the calories burned *during* TV watching instead of the calories burned *by* TV watching. Lets fix that. 2228 calories/day for his RMR, add 344 calories that he burned *by* watching TV – that totals to 2572 calories a day. Lets decrease that by 10% so he can lose weight and his real caloric target for the day is 2314 calories.

Formulas

The METs use Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) which is calculated from the 1984 revised Harris Benedict model as follows:

• Male RMR = 88.362 + 4.799 x (Height cm) + 13.397 x (Weight kg) – 5.677 x (Age yr)
• Female RMR = 477.593 + 3.098 x (Height cm) + 9.247 x (Weight kg) – 4.6756 x (Age yr)

Or, if you choose the Mifflin St. Jeor Equations in step 8, the RMR is calculated as follows:

• Male RMR = 5 + 6.25 x (Height cm) + 9.99 x (Weight kg) – 4.92 x (Age yr)
• Female RMR = = 161 + 6.25 x (Height cm) + 9.99 x (Weight kg) – 4.92 x (Age yr)

Next a correction factor is applied to the 2011 METs to correct for weight.

• Corrected MET value = value from 2011 compendium * ( (3.5 ml.kg-1.min-1) / (RMR calculated above) )

Note: RMR has to be converted to ml.kg-1.min-1 first with this equation:

• ml/kg*min = 1000 * ((kcal/day / (1440 * 5))

Finally, the calories burned by the activity are calculated as follows:

• Calories burned = minutes x RMR/1440 x corrected METs

WARNING

There are two ways you can count calories, you have to use one or the other but you cannot use both! One is easier and one is harder but more accurate.

Method 1: The easiest way is to use my caloric calculator or my accurate calorie calculator. In these calculators you simply estimate the total number of hours cardio you do in a week, strenuous cardio – lifting weights does not count. These calculators actually do a great job at getting pretty darn close to estimating your caloric targets and they are easy to use.

Method 2: This method is more work but more accurate. In this method, you tally your energy expended in every single activity. You start with your base metabolic rate which is how many calories you use while doing nothing and then calculate the calories used in every single activity (this calculator). A lot of people really like doing this because it lets them do tradeoffs, for example, “I can eat two slices of pizza if I run for an hour”.

What you may NOT do is mix the two. If you are using my easy to use calorie calculator, then you cannot add calories to your daily budget for exercise done using this calculator. If you do that, you will get FAT, and quickly! Nuff said!