Net Calories - How Many Calories Are You Really Burning?

Most of us look to calorie counters when we work out, whether it's on the cardio equipment or as part of our heart rate monitors, so when a machine says we've burned 300 calories, we assume that this is correct, given a few calories here and there to account for machine calibration, etc.

But that number is misleading because it counts the total calories burned during your exercise.

Net calorie burn is the number of calories you burn minus the resting metabolic calories your body would have burned, during the time of the workout, even if you had never gotten off the sofa.

So if you're running on the treadmill and the calorie counter reads 300 calories burned at the end of your workout, you've actually only burned 252 extra calories during that workout. The other 48 calories would have been burned even if you didn't show up to the gym.

This is not meant to frustrate people and keep them from working out. It's just to remind you that when you are putting together your weight loss or fitness plan that you should be realistic in the amount of calories you are burning during the day.

Most of us take our Basal Metabolic Rate (the calories our body alive on a typical day) that we have calculated online somewhere and we add all the calories we see on the calorie counters and we figured we've worked out enough to meet our goals when we should only be adding net calories to our BMR.

The only question now is why didn't anyone tell us this before?