My Fitness Pal

[Irulan]

This is what the boyfriend and I have been doing, and we've been at it for 2 months now. I'm down 13 pounds, he's down 19, and I wouldn't say we've been super diligent (there have been friday night fish fry dinners, happy hour afternoons, etc.)

What I love about MFP is that it keeps you aware, more than anything. If I have a glass of wine, I know what I've just put into my body, and that makes it less likely I'll have an entire pint of Ben and Jerrys ice cream. Even if the app over-calculates, I try to at least log the work I'm doing.

Also, as a vegetarian, I've been focusing on sodium and protein - pre-packaged foods often have way more sodium than necessary, and protein is hard to come by in veggies. So it's forced me to be more creative about my nutrition. I've learned to like kale, eggs, and beans a lot more than I thought I would.

no kidding on the sodium in pre packaged foods! Even so called "healthy" ones. If anyone can ever find a low sodium Siracha type product, let me know.

[bluebug32]

It's hard to find reliable calorie burn information. Even heart rate monitors tend to estimate on the high side and the machines at gyms are usually off as well. I'm on MFP and I find that what works best is to just input the calorie burn straight from my Garmin, which is typically a few hundred calories lower than MFP's estimation. Even the calorie counts for the same food can vary on MFP. My advice: use it to help guide you nutritionally, but understand that it's just an estimate and adjust your diet/fitness accordingly.

[beccaB]

I decided to modify the calories fitness pal says I burned to about half. Except for the week preceding a century ride. then I have to eat more.

[goldfinch]

It is fairly easy to figure out how many calories you take in, but it is almost impossible to figure out how many you burn outside of a lab. All the tools are not accurate. The closest is probably a power meter. The next closest probably a heart rate monitor. The problem is that there are too many variables and when you estimate so many variables there is potential for error stacked on top of error leading to sometimes wildly inaccurate results. You might enter your age, sex and height into a heart rate monitor but the monitor still doesn't know your fat mass, personal metabolic rate, individual heart rate differences, your general fitness and health, your stress level, the air temperature (heart rate goes up when it is hot), and even your adaptation to a type of exercise, all of which can effect calories burned or the estimate of calories burned.

Calculators that estimate without heart rate, like online tools, are so inaccurate as to be useless. They add the variable of guessing your effort. Twelve miles an hour may be easy effort on the flats and a bear on the hills. Sixteen mph may be hard effort for some and easy for others, or hard in a head wind and easy with a tail wind, hard on a rough road, easy on a smooth. Easy on the road bike and next to impossible on a mountain bike. Etc.

[beccaB]

I do know that there are days that if I stick to 1450 calories, to lose the 7 or so pounds I want gone, I will crash and burn. On the days I only do strength training I can stick to 1450 and feel ok. But not bike days. So the credit for half of what fitness pal says I burned seems to get me through most of those regular bike riding days, but maybe not the long hauls.

[bathedinshadow]

As others have mentioned, without a HR monitor, the estimates are pretty pointless. They can vary SO much. I don't use myfitnesspal, but instead mammyride. Not because it's better, but because it's more exercise focused and keeps track of a lot of different stats. So here is an example as to how completely off those estimates can be. Yesterday I did a 3 hour ride. My average HR was 153, with substantial time above 170. On my iPhone app, it said I burnt 1600 calories. Likely an overestimate. But I was really pushing it, so it's actually probably not too far off. When I put it into mapmyride, it said 600 calories. That's not factoring in my HR, but rather just the distance I rode and how long it took. It doesn't consider that I climbed 3000 feet and much of the downhill was actually me popping the wheel up and over 1-2 foot roots (lots of effort). When you're connected to a HR monitor, that's indirectly considering that.

And also like others have said, everybody has a different calorie burn. All of these measurements are estimates. Some are more accurate than others, but none of them are actually correct. So many factors that you can't measure.

The best thing you can do is trial and error in terms of losing weight. And sadly, once you lose some weight, it's likely you'll have to trial and error again as your body will be changing.