Last updated July 2026.
You finish a session, the console says you burned 400 calories, and it’s tempting to treat that as 400 extra calories of food you’ve earned. This is one of the most common ways people accidentally stall their own progress, and it comes straight back to the accuracy problem covered elsewhere on this site.
Why This Backfires
Independent testing at UC San Francisco’s Human Performance Center found treadmills overestimate calorie burn by roughly 13% on average compared to lab measurement, with cardio machines overestimating by about 19% on average overall. Full details on our accuracy page.
If you eat back the full amount the console claims, and the real number is 13% lower, you’re not maintaining the deficit you think you’re maintaining. Do that consistently across multiple sessions a week, and a meaningful gap opens up between the deficit you believe you’re running and the one that’s actually happening.
A Concrete Example
Say your console shows 400 calories for a session, four times a week, and you eat back the full 400 each time. If the real figure is 13% lower, about 348 calories, you’re overcrediting yourself by roughly 52 calories per session, or about 208 calories a week. That’s a small number on any single day, but over a month it adds up to roughly 900 calories of unaccounted food, more than a full meal’s worth of miscalculation, purely from trusting a number that was never quite right to begin with.
What to Do Instead
- Don’t treat exercise calories as a food budget to spend. Build your eating plan around your overall goals first, and treat treadmill sessions as a separate, additional contribution to your deficit rather than a direct trade for extra food.
- If you do want to account for it, use a conservative estimate. Rather than eating back 100% of a console number, some people find it more reliable to only account for a portion of it, acknowledging the built-in overestimation.
- Use a transparent formula where possible. A MET-based calculator like the one on this site at least shows you the actual math, rather than a black-box console algorithm calibrated to a generic reference body.
- Track your real weight trend. Over several weeks, your actual results are a more reliable signal than any single session’s calorie estimate, console or calculator.