Calories burned - HRM accuracy?

How long was your long run?

When I saw Nancy Clark the nutritionist that writes articles for BT, she said that HRM estimates based on if you had lean body mass for most of your weight. For me I weigh about 183 today, and my lean body mass is 124. It assumes that I'm a fit 183 which would make me a very tall women or a man, with a lean body mass of 160 or something. It makes no sense because you put your height in as well.

Obviously I burn less calories with my lean body mass of 124 than the assumption of 160 or so that my HRM estimates. My understanding is the more fat pounds you have the farther off it will be.

I agree that I want to know how many calories I really burn to tweak my diet and exercise so I can lose weight.

Nancy estimated that I burn about 600-700 calories an hour running and biking. Where my HRM (Polar) says I often burn more than 1000 calories in an hour especially on runs.

How do you like balancelog? Is it a program or online? Can you enter custom foods and receipes and figure out a portion say 1/5 of the receipe nutritional content? We make mostly homemade stuff and have a hard time with most calorie programs figuring out home made foods with multiple ingredients.

Also you talked about bodygem before, has your RMR changed since you had it redone?

I found a website that I liked and used that did calories burned for triathletes. I need to do a search and will post the link if I can find it. It seemed to be more in line with what I have read and not what my HRM reports.

Edited by KathyG 2005-10-12 6:28 PM

Here is one calculator I found, but not the one I used before. It is based mostly on distance not time So if a fast runner can run 6.2 miles in the same amount of time I run a 3.1 miles, do they burn twice the calories if they weigh the same? There is a time estimator for calculating how long it will take you to do a Tri which is cool.

http://www.triadtriteam.com/tools/calc_calorie.htm

Interesting article on why swimming doesn't cause weight loss:

http://www.thefactsaboutfitness.com/research/swimming.htm

The differences were on a 3 mile run...it makes sense though.  I'll just try to chill about it all...it doesn't seem to be as scientific as I would like anyway.

I love balancelog, although it isn't good with recipes.  You need to use a recipe program (like mastercook) that gives you the breakdown, but you CAN put in the calories, etc for the entire batch and then tell it you are eating just .2 of it....That helps a lot.  It runs on either a pc or on a palm pilot, so for me I have it with me on my palm (treo phone actually) all the time and can enter things on the fly or, more importantly, look them up when I need to talk myself out of something.

I have had the bodygem test done 3 times so far, at 6 month intervals, and it has changed each time.  Unfortunately as you lose weight it goes down, but here are the results I've had so far:

August 2004: 261 pounds, 46% body fat, RMR of 2180

March 2005: 224.6 pounds, 44% body fat, RMR of 1910

September 2005: 213 pounds, 40% body fat, RMR of 1810

The neat thing about the balancelog software is that it was made by healthetech, the company that makes the bodygem, and can take that measurement into account when it calculates your calorie targets.  Without it it gives me a calorie target over 200 calories per day lower.

Anyway, I guess I'll just use the calories on the HRM as a relative number - to show me days when I'm slacking vs ones when I'm kicking butt....Or maybe even turn the feature off until I drop another 10-15% body fat....