New to this community.

Hi everyone!  I'm new in this community and I've been looking for a good program to count calories.  Good thing this site is free.  I've been tryin this for just 2 days and I somewhat find it difficult to count calories because of discrepancies in nutrition information.  Like GNC shake for example, it says different on the actual container and the one  I can pull up online.  Or say the elliptical machine exercise, says for 45 minutes of moderate effort I burn 600 plus calories but on the actual elliptical machine itself it says only 530 calories.  How do you guys account for the discrepancy?  Do you just us it as gauge?  Any feedback will be tremendously helpful.  Thanks.

I don't know why there are discrepencies in the nutritional information on the packaging of your foods, however I can shed some light on the eliptical issue.

CC calculates the calories burned specifically for the sex, weight and height that you have told the database you are.  The heavier you are, the more calories you will burn per minute exercising.  If you have a heart rate monitor, you can get an even more accurate figure.  The figure the machine in the gym gives you is an overall generic estimate, that is not going to be very accurate.  I always go by the figure that CC gives me, and since I got my heart rate monitor, I double check it, and it's usually very accurate.

Thanks so much.  I guess I will just use CC as the standard.  This is really helpful.