Calorie counting and calorie burning exercise question?

[Ifcatshadthumbs]

Am sticking to around 1500 calories a day which I find reasonably doable. My question is if I go to the gym and burn say 200 calories does that mean my food intake can go up to 1700 for that day?

I find on days I go to the gym I am far to hungry to stick to 1500 calories.

That's what I do.

It can but I never use the calories I burn through exercise, can't see the point. But yes, you can use them :)

Yes you can and if it's between going to the gym and eating your burned calories or not going to the gym then go to the gym.

One word of caution, it is very easy to over estimate the calories you burn, in fact you need pretty decent tech to do it well ie; decent sports watch and heart rate monitor and even that isn't 100%

The sort of readouts you get on gym equipment and phone apps are pretty useless if you are being strict.

It is very easy to think you have burn say 300 cals when actually it's 180-200 cal.

Thanks for the replies. The running machines, rowers etc all show a calorie count on them, pretty depressing to see how far you have to run to burn a 100 calories! I do a 1 hour body attack class that I've been told burns approximately 500 calories if you really go for it but my god it hurts!

Agree with newbie. Most of the claims about calories burned for exercise, e.g. classes, are based on people who weigh i.r.o 11 stone /150lbs. If you weigh less than that, you may not burn that number of calories.

However, your personal physiology needs to be taken into account. Having recently started using a heart rate monitor, I was surprised to see in my high intensity class the other night that I burned more calories than another woman who was wearing a monitor. She must have been at least two stone heavier than me - and athletic looking not fat. She was taller and bigger all round, did the same class and burned fewer calories. Our instructor was quite surprised too.

The published numbers aren't much help IMO.

In answer to your question, sometimes I eat my exercise calories and sometimes I don't.

I wear a HRM so I know exactly what I am burning. The machines in the gym are massively inaccurate, always say you have burned loads more than you actually have!

My trainer really told me off last week because I burned more calories than I ate one day.......that's bad (I was quite chuffed though :) )