Do you deduct calories which you burn from the gym?

[lizzie0765]

So say your allowed 1400 calories in a day but you burn 500 at the gym... are you allowed to have 500 calories to make up for the calories you burnt or still only 1400kcal?

[Bkkbull]

Well,

despite the benefits of exercise for everything apart from losing the weight and there are so many, the choice is really yours i guess. Its quite hard to know exactly what 500 calories burnt are, unless your using a heart rate meter with a strap, even then its not exact.

But seems a little pointless to work that hard to just go and add the calories back on, depends how serious you are for the weight loss. But ive seen so many people at my gym, work out, then go to the coffee shop and eat, as they have just burnt some calories off.

seems pointless in my eyes.

500 calories as in your example, takes a lot of effort to burn off in 1 hour.

Good luck

[Hidden]

Hi lizzie0765,

I personally would suggest you don't - unless you're losing weight too fast, i.e. significantly over an average of about 1 Kg a week. (And taking into account you lose weight faster in the first couple of weeks).

I think there's a bit of a myth that if you just look inside a gym you've suddenly burnt off several thousand calories and therefore must drink bottles of Red Bull / Lucozade / whatever by the crateful.

That impression is probably promoted by advertising men trying to sell those products.

It's probably nearer to the mark to say that unless you are pretty much hammering it at the gym, your best hydration drink it probably going to be .... water.

The main gains of exercise - insofar as it relates to weight-loss - are more about encouraging your body to go into fat burn mode rather than fat storage mode, getting your heart rate up / improving your stamina, improving your general level of fitness and moving people away from sedentary lifestyles. A degree of flexibility improvement and some muscle building are clearly beneficial too.

It's not so related to direct calorie burn - and certainly not as in altering down the input calories - but I guess you could try to make some best guestimate about it if you felt you needed to compensate for either not losing weight or losing weight too quickly.

I suppose I'm wondering if you'd spent an hour swimming, would you think you should take some amount of calories off for that too? Or, playing football with the kids? Or walking down to the shops? Or spring-cleaning the house? Or a half-hour of passion?

I mean, once you get into that, just where do you draw the line?

[lizzie0765]

Thank you very much for your help guys

[geemel79]

i stick to my set calorie intake limit which is 1200 a day if i burn off 300 calories i still stick to it, my friend on the other hand uses calories she burns to eat more , which she always manages to find about 400 calories a day extra from walking housework etc !!!! me i only add calories from full on cardio exercise im losing weight she aint !!! shes only fooling herself i must say all the housework shes doing i cant wait to see her show home as it must be sparkling