What Net Calories Really Means
When you are tracking calories to try to lose weight , some apps try to help you by giving you ” net calories ” – a number that takes into account your food and exercise. But this can be confusing, and worse, each application calculates it differently.
If you are focusing on net calories rather than total calories, you are referring to exercise. This makes sense for serious workouts that you don’t do every day, like a weekly six-mile run that burns 600 calories. While you may not need to eat more on hard training days, it is likely that you will eventually want to do so. The net calorie reading lets you know exactly how much pillow you have.
Each app calculates net calories differently
If you make $ 50 from your lemonade kiosk but spent $ 20 on lemons and sugar, your net amount is $ 30, which you can take home and put in your piggy bank. When it comes to calories, food tracking apps do a similar calculation for the calories you eat and the calories you burn to get to your network. But to be confused, everyone does it their own way. Here are two approaches you are likely to see:
- MyFitnessPal and LoseIt calculate net calories as what you ate minus what you burned from exercise. So, if you eat 2,000 calories but run three miles, your net result could be 1,700 calories. On a good day, your net calories will be the same as your goal, which the app calculates for you.
- CalorieCount and FatSecret calculate net calories as what you eat minus what you expect to burn in total . It also subtracts the calories you burn while sleeping, or while sitting at your desk or when tinkering with your daily activities. This means your mesh will be zero if you keep your weight. If you are going to lose weight, it will be a negative number, and if you are gaining weight, it will be a positive number.
Both approaches take into account the same numbers (what you eat, what you burn with exercise, what you burn just living), they just do the math differently and come to different conclusions.
How to know if your “net calories” number is accurate
If you’re aiming for a 500 calorie deficit a day (a tutorial, although not necessarily the right one , is how to lose a pound a week), the MyFitnessPal approach will take that into account when setting your goal. You will still strive to keep your net calories in line with your goal. On the other hand, with the CalorieCount approach, you will want to see a net -500 every day.
Both approaches assume how many calories you burn outside of exercise. MyFitnessPal uses them to determine your goal and CalorieCount calculates them for your burn. These numbers are taken from two sources.
- One of them is your basal metabolic rate (BMR). This is what it takes to stay alive: the calories you burn on invisible tasks like breathing, thinking, and keeping warm. Your app calculates this using one of these formulas based on your weight, height, gender, and age.
- Then, to account for the calories you burn by walking and doing your daily activities, they add a certain percentage. This is why the app asks you if you are sedentary, inactive, etc. If you are wondering, here is one of the popular formulas they put this information into. If you choose the right activity level , you don’t need to log every minute of exercise; it will be built into your estimated calories burned. In fact, we tend to overestimate how much energy we expend on exercise and underestimate the calories we consume.
But all of these numbers are only rough estimates of how many calories a person is likely to burn. They do not reflect what is actually going on inside your body. Calorie counting has many sources of error : food labels and treadmill calorie readings have their own margin of error, and in addition, every organism is slightly different. You burn more calories at rest, for example, if you have more muscle than fat. The calorie burn of two people may even be different depending on who fidgets more .
For this reason, it is important to pay attention to what results you get. If your net calories are higher than your goal (or above zero), but you are still losing weight, it means that you are doing something right. On the other hand, if you stick with the correct numbers in the app but don’t see the results you want, you can make some adjustments – either by changing your activity settings to nudge the numbers in the right direction, or just remembering to eat a little less than the numbers say.
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