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I have been going along on this weight loss journey counting my calories and exercising. I have just been going with what Lose It! or my treadmill tells me I am burning, and not really thinking much of it. Well the other day I decided to strap on my heart rate monitor and crunch some numbers.
Running - I run at 5 mph on the treadmill, so not killing it by any means, but I get it done. The other day I ran for 40 minutes. According to Lose It! I burned 416 calories. My treadmill had me at 417 after a 5 minute cool down. So those have been pretty close all along. According to my heart rate monitor, an Iron Man, my average heart rate was 157 for the 40 minutes of exercise (I did not include the cool down) and the calories burned was 740-something! Wow. That was a big difference so I decided to use EBSCalc on the iPod touch which has a calorie burned calculator. According to that I had burned like 640-something.
It sort of makes sense to me, I do have a ridiculously high heart rate so any calculations based on that might be off a little. Those calculators also take my age and weight into consideration and my treadmill, not so much. So it got me thinking - how many calories am I really burning during the 30 Day Shred? So this morning I used my heart rate monitor again.
The Shred - A 25 minute circuit training video by Jillian Michaels. I am currently at Level 3 and it kicks my butt pretty good. According to Lose It! 25 minutes of circuit training burns 261 calories (267 calories at the beginning of the year!). According to my heart rate monitor my average heart rate was 137 and I burned 360 calories. And EBSCalc tallied my calories burned at 320.
So I am still tracking my calories with Lose It! and will be sticking with their ideas of calories burned. I figure that it has worked so far, 13 pounds this year and nearly 40 total! Also, I am sure that I underestimate some food choices so it all comes out in the end. It has been an interesting little experiment, teaching me a little more about exercise every day!
