Heart rate monitor

[TrollyDolly1]

Does anyone use a heart rate monitor that they could recommend? I'm doing 30 day shred, couch 25k and various classes at the gym and I would like an idea of how many calories I am burning.

I am doing MFP which I love and I am on 1400 calories per day. I'm easily sticking to it but it would be nice to know how many calories I am using, it spurs me on if I can think, just burned off breakfast.

Watching with interest, I want to know this too!

I have a HRM it's a basic Polar with no GPS - I bought it to track my heart rate, so I could train in the zone of 65-75% while running, it does provide an estimate of calorie burn but I rarely pay any attention to it. I also bought a fitbit pedometer which tracks my movement throughout the day, find this more convenient, it sometimes over estimates (too high for walking), sometimes underestimates (too low for running) - I think it probably evens it itself out. And I have looked at calorie burn using a GPS tracking on my iPhone.

They all give different values, most are gross figures - they don't account for the basal metabolic burn, so you are likely to over-estimate your additional burn from exercise.
The shred burns around 200kcals, running for 30mins burns around 300kcals and an hours dance class between 300-400kcal depending on how hard you work.

I would plan not to eat back all my calories.

I have one - it is a Polar F4 I believe and I love it. Got it from ebay or amazon (can't remember which) for about £50 :)

I use a Fitbit, which isn't a HRM but does track your steps and works out calorie expenditure from the other information you enter (e.g. weight, height etc). I love it and it definitely spurs me on to exercise more. It also links directly to MFP, so I set my activity level to sedentary and then I get a 'Fitbit Adjustment' in the exercise section which adds on any calories burned through exercise.

I have a fitbit but I'm not convinced of it's accuracy!

Thanks for the replies. I'm going to look through eBay, see if there is any thing there.

It's good to know that shred is about 200 calories! Makes it seem even more worthwhile now. I start level 2 today, but I keep putting it off. It looks so hard!

Despite the Fitbit's lack of accuracy, I still think it's a good option for tracking your activity and motivating you to move more. As long as you recognise that it's not 100% accurate and don't try to eat all of your activity calories, it's exaggeration of calories burnt isn't a big problem.