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Eating your exercise

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Replies

  • TeaBea
    TeaBea Posts: 14,517 Member
    edited March 2015
    rebeccaschlaht wrote: »
    i have an extra snack of 15 almonds and fruit or cheese and fruit. I do not eat my calories. I dont trust that my 60 minute hike actually burned 750 calories. But I am trying to lose a lot of weight. If I was maintaining or gaining I would eat my calories

    MFP as designed gives you a deficit BEFORE exercise. That way people who can't/won't exercise will still lose weight.

    MFP adds calories back so you ideally get back to your starting deficit. This is why many people eat only 50-75% back, because calorie burns are tough to estimate.

    As you get closer to goal it will become more important to eat calories back. A really large deficit makes it hard for your body to keep lean muscle while dieting. Heavier people don't need to worry so much at the beginning.
  • brightsideofpink
    brightsideofpink Posts: 1,018 Member
    I eat most of them, leaving a small buffer because fitbit tends to extrapolate a bit much if I sync too early in the evening. I've been doing this long enough to know the accuracy of my food logging and fitbit adjustments so I know that I have actually burned these extra calories. I don't manually log exercise into MFP so no worries there about overestimating.

    Because I want to finish with a known deficit, and don't want to go too far over or under, I eat them. The only exceptions are days when I exercise late and am just not hungry afterwards. But that is rare- I like food :)
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