I think it's safe to say that most people who are trying to lose weight drastically overestimate their calorie expenditure and underestimate their calorie intake, not a great combination.
It is far easier to estimate the calories in our diet than it is to estimate how many calories we are truly burning in the gym, mainly due to the inaccurate measuring of expenditure on both wearable devices and cardiovascular machines in the gym.
Studies have shown the Fitbit Surge 2 to have the most accurate calories burned calculation among a group of similar devices, with an error rate just over 25%. The other similar devices tested had comparatively higher error rates – up to as much as 93%.
In another study from the University of California they found that treadmills overestimated calorie burn by 13%, the stationary bike overestimated calorie burn by 7%, the stair climber overestimated calorie burn by 12% and the cross trainer overestimated calorie burn by a whopping 42%.
The above is why I am adamant that people should never 'eat back' their gym calories, (you can read more about that in a previous post here) because the reality is that we don't yet have an accurate way of truly measuring calorie burn outside a lab, no matter what the Fitbit marketing team tells you.
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