Tracking Your Calorie Burn

March 29th, 2010 Posted in Weight Loss

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When you are tracking calories, it’s not only important to know how many you are taking in, but to also have an idea of how many you are burning each day. For myself, I have always just used my FitDay software to kind of guesstimate my daily calorie burn. With FitDay, and other software like it, you enter your weight, and your daily activities and it calculates how many calories you burn. It requires some guesswork. You have to estimate how many hours per day you spend sitting at a desk, walking, preparing meals, exercising, etc. You really only have to do this once to get a decent guess at how much you are burning.

I have always believed that it’s not really crucial to be perfectly accurate, but more important to be consistent. If you think you are burning 2500 calories per day, and your weight loss is stalled, you can increase your activity until you think you are burning 3000 calories per day. Whether those numbers are perfectly accurate or not isn’t really too relevant (as long as they are reasonable). However, if you want to be more accurate, then there are ways you can do so.

I have been looking into various armbands that are supposed to track your daily calorie burn for you. One that many of us have seen on the Biggest Loser is the BodyBugg. One of the biggest drawbacks of this particular system is the cost. As of right now, you pay $250 upfront, and $9.95 per month for a subscription to access and analyze your data. I don’t think there’s any way to use it without paying that monthly fee. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Another one I have looked at is the dotFit exerspy. Again, you pay upfront and also have to pay a monthly fee, although in the long run it looks to be a better deal than BodyBugg. I do like a lot of the features of this one though.

I want to hear from you! If anyone has had any experience with these or any other calorie counting arm bands, please post in the comments. Let us know what you like or dislike about them.

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