10 Biggest Fitness Mistakes That Are Making You Fat Mistake #9:

Mistake #9: You climb off the treadmill when it says you’ve reached your calorie goal.

Hate to break it to you, but the calorie calculation displayed on most of those machines isn't accurate. Many pieces of equipment are built to show you what you want to see. And the assumptions needed to validate the machine's calculations (read: You’re as jacked as Hugh Jackman in Wolverine and are putting your full weight on the machine) are seldom met. So use the counters as a light reference, but know that those numbers are anything but reliable. Instead, do your own calculations. If your thing is, say, running a 12-minute mile for 20 minutes, use a calorie -counting tool like this one to find out how many calories per hour a person of your age and weight burns doing exactly that, and divide by three. (Then compare it with what the treadmill says you burned -- and you'll see how inaccurate it really is!)