My recumbent bike has my height, weight, and gender programmed into it and says I burn 398 calories for 60 minutes at my current level of resistance.

My Lose It app on my iphone says I burn 638 calories for the same.

My Fitness Pal app on my iphone says I burn 603 calories for this.

This is such a wide discrepancy between the bike and the apps.

I guess I'm not too concerned about the numbers since I know I'm getting a good workout (higher heart rate, slightly sore when finished, and legs are getting toned).

My concern is really there is really conflicting information out there about EVERYTHING dieters are concerned about. For example, I think it was teacherlady who posted about the amount of sodium in an Applebee's steak(which was like a little stab to my heart, btw, since I eat that about once every two weeks.) It makes you wonder about what other things might be affecting our progress that we don't know about.

I'm glad MRC does a lot of the planning for us, i.e, portion sizes, minutes of exercise, protein dosing, etc.

Of course, I'm always one who likes to do her own research too but I'm glad I'm not counting points, carbs, etc.

It's nice to have so much guidance.

Oh, and speaking of which, I was reading this article last week about how some EVOOs are not really EVOOS at all. Many major distributors are using canola oil instead of extra virgin olive oil but not marketing it as such.

The best way to check is to put your EVOO in the refrigerator for a day and if it stays clear, you have something beside olive oil in the bottle. If it's cloudy, then it's clearly olive oil.

I couldn't find that article to post it here but maybe someone else has heard of this too.

I've noticed several apps are "off" on calories - not sure where they grab information from either so I can't say their sources are wrong. I normally pull my stuff off Livestrong.com - the basic is free and it gives you caloric burn for most exercises.

However the last time I logged in they were cleaning up their food database so I am hoping much of this will be highly accurate now so I have a sense of how many calories I am eating. It will help when I go off program to know how the two work together!

Also I haven't heard that about EVOO - good to know though - I might test it out tonight.