Does the number of calories I burn in a workout matter?

Yes… exercise burns calories. That is TRUE!

And yes, cardio can increase a deficit... but tracking the number of “calories burned” isn’t necessary at all… because we can’t actually know what we’ve burned from exercise without being in a science lab!! Everyone’s bodies are SO different.

SO ‼️ here’s why the actual numbers aren’t so helpful & you can ignore them:

1️⃣ our fitness watches are highly inaccurate, so you can’t even consider the number reliable (here’s an article on it!!)

2️⃣ our bodies adapt to frequent exercise / cardio to reduce the calories burned and conserve energy and our metabolic adaptation can’t be tracked by a fitness watch (I will absolutely have a podcast episode to cover this by the end of 2024, but in the meantime, I love these episodes on how our body adapts to cardio from Fit Body, Happy Joints: first one & second one)

3️⃣ one-time calorie burn is less important for overall health than building a consistent routine that includes cardio you enjoy alongside regular weight training (so I’d rather you focus on 15-30 minutes a couple times a week versus obsessing over getting a certain calorie burn number once or twice)

4️⃣ if you’re tracking macros, your activity is baked in as a RANGE already (assuming it’s based on a calculated TDEE, which every coach I know uses) so the precise calories burned in your cardio workout just don’t matter (& they shouldn’t be added back to your daily food!)… want to learn more about TDEE (This means Total Daily Energy Expenditure!!)? Here is a behind the scenes preview of my program The Health Accelerator - in Week 3, I deep dive into metabolism & talk about TDEE. Watch it here!

Did I finally convince you to ditch the numbers?? 👀

PS if you want something to track movement instead, I think step count daily is a much better metric!