NYT Article - Overestimating your Calorie Counts

A New York Times article from earlier this month laughs about how people often wildly overestimate the number of calories they think they are burning when they workout.

The entire article is worth reading but here are some interesting bullet points:

• Holding onto the handle bar while doing cardio reduces your burn rate by 50% for some machines. I know that's certainly true when using a treadmill on a steep setting -- by holding on to the handle bar or grips you can make your body perpendicular to the tread, effectively making the surface flat again. D'oh!
  
• Machines drift in speed and grade. This is certainly true in my experience -- after becoming familiar with a set of elliptical trainers for example you may start subconsciously (or consciously!) choosing the one that seems "easier" than the others. I'm as guilty as the next person of this.
• Subtract the calories you would have burned sitting on your ass. For example, suppose I walk on a treadmill for 30 minutes and the counter says I burned, oh, 200 calories. Well if I'd been sitting around watching TV for 30 minutes I would have burned 40 calories. So how many more calories can I eat today? 160. Three Oreos, not four. As the Hacker's Diet says, it's better to just not eat them the in first place rather than try to burn them off!

If you are following the Hacker's Diet religiously and you are measuring every calorie that you are putting in your system, then you know exactly how many calories you are burning. Therefore you can tell how accurate your machines are because you can measure them against your spreadsheet.

But if you're like me and you have somewhat of a life, you have to estimate many of your restaurant meals and various "Goodies" that you might be treating yourself to and you can't really be sure how accurate your count is.

So I try to underestimate my calorie counts and mentally compare them to "was that workout really as hard as walking for one hour, which would have burned 300 calories?"

You know what's sad? I'm eating Doritos while I write this. But its a 100 calorie bag -- the little chips are like the size of a nickel. Not bad.