Our answer is absolutely not. We realize many popular apps recommend this, but we are not in favor of it for several reasons.⁠

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REASON 1:

ALL monitors (including watches) that claim to track ‘calories burned’ during exercise drastically overestimate how many calories are burned from exercise. A recent study found that, on average, these devices overestimated calories burned during exercise by 28-93%! That means if you burned 500 calories, your device might tell you that you burned 630 up to nearly 1000! No wonder many claim they are eating in a calorie deficit and can’t lose weight!

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REASON 2:

It can lead to binging and purging via exercise. “Oh, I can have the whole cheesecake, and all I need to do is 4 hours of activity to ‘burn’ it off!” It is very difficult to out exercise a poor diet.

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Trying to ‘eat back’ the calories you burn during exercise is a great way to NOT make progress.

Carbon takes into account any exercise you are doing by manipulating your macros to reach the desired rate of progress each week. As long as you are hitting your macro targets and checking into the app regularly, it will adjust to find exactly where you need to eat to progress.