Using tracked calories

[Choice4567]

Hi all, I’m using my fitness pal to track my calories. Combined with walking at least an hour a day I’m making good progress

just a quick question about calories earned through exercise. I’ve read other people saying they ignore them because they’re not accurate. My baseline is 1200 and I stick to it, and gain around 500 through exercise. I mostly ignore them in case they’re not accurate

But I measure my walks on my Apple Watch, which tracks my heart rate and walking speed and distance, so are the calories sort of accurate?

You are exercising for health and fitness. Weight loss is mostly down to diet rather than exercise. You know you are exercising, just stick to your calorie target and don’t worry about what it tells you you are burning would be my advice.

Very true. I know it’s sensible to stick to baseline. Just hard sometimes when my fitness pal show them as being available calories!

The answer is, it depends. I assume you just don’t want to lose weight but also maintain the new weight and stay healthy and strong - for that you need muscles and they need fuel and hard work to grow.
I think it’s sensible to count in strenuous activity - if you go for a 20 km intensive hike your body needs fuel, if you spend an hour lifting heavy weights it’s the same.
I would not account for general walking, leisure cycling and short workouts, it’s very likely that your watch overestimates calories from daily activities.

I mean only the calories it states from the 1 hour walk I do. It doesn’t seem to add any calories for anything else. I put my watch into exercise walking mode and it tracks I burn around 300 calories.

But I like the thought that you’ve both said, that I’m exercising to help future me maintain all this 😊