Do you count your "exercise calories"?

TeaBea

AlexisMichele93 wrote: »

Yeah I was just wondering which calculation MFP uses to determine what your deficit should be. Not that I'm uncomfortable with mine, it's actually great. I was just curious.
Yes I will not be going for muscles but knowing I will be okay on my deficit for just toning my arms and legs is good to hear. I wanted to be sure I wasn't under fueling myself even if it is for a small goal (weight loss).

The deficit is based in part by "I want to lose XX pounds per week." MFPs lowest minimum (before exercise...activity level is not the same thing) is 1200. When a young person has that number, it's always a little suspicious.

You're comfortable....it sounds like you put in reasonable goals. That's not always the case.

AlexisMichele93

cwolfman13 wrote: »

AlexisMichele93 wrote: »

Yeah I was just wondering which calculation MFP uses to determine what your deficit should be. Not that I'm uncomfortable with mine, it's actually great. I was just curious.
Yes I will not be going for muscles but knowing I will be okay on my deficit for just toning my arms and legs is good to hear. I wanted to be sure I wasn't under fueling myself even if it is for a small goal (weight loss).

MFP uses the NEAT method (Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis) whereby your calorie goals are derived from your stats and non exercise daily activity. As such, exercise is an unaccounted for activity....now if someone is just burning a handful of calories going for a walk or something, this isn't all that big of a deal...if someone is training hard and burning 100s and 100s of calories, not accounting for exercise can create enormous problems because not only is there a huge deficit already built in, but all of the exercise is making it even bigger...this isn't always optimal given that your body has some basic energy (calorie) requirements just for existing and maintaining bodily functions.

When people under-eat and over-exercise, they're not giving themselves the energy required simply to function properly, let alone recover and repair the body.

Thanks! I didn't think I was overdoing it with my personal exercise which is why I wasn't recording it but I wanted to be sure after reading some of the replies here. I'm a biochemist and with it comes knowing about basic nutrition needed for those biochemical processes, but I'm by no means well versed in nutrition as a whole so I wanted to ask the more experienced! I would eat it back if I ever dipped below 1200 as I know my body couldn't sustain off of that, but 1300 is pretty close so I didn't want to step too far down.

TimothyFish

MFP adds exercise calories to whatever it has calculated for normal activity. If I exercise two hours, it is going to record 200 extra calories because I normally burn 100 calories per hour doing nothing and those 100 calories are also included in the calories burned for an activity. Then there are errors in the number of calories estimated for exercise, since it doesn't take into account the terrain, etc. So I don't eat my whole allowance after exercise, but I do eat more on exercise days than I do on other days.

FullofTrixie

ok I am new here. Do I eat them or not?
I have a fitbit but not set up to sync. looks like I can just log exercise manually so I guess I will do that. If I should eat my earned calories that is cool, but it seems like it would be a lot.

janejellyroll

thinkthinnert wrote: »

ok I am new here. Do I eat them or not?
I have a fitbit but not set up to sync. looks like I can just log exercise manually so I guess I will do that. If I should eat my earned calories that is cool, but it seems like it would be a lot.

You could do what a lot of people do . . . eat back a portion of them. I eat about 75% of them. MFP is set up to eat back exercise calories. It isn't eating them back that is the problem -- it's over-estimated calorie burns when you log exercise.

yiscaht

Thanks everyone, for the feedback. Guess I'll keep chugging along and re-evaluate in a few weeks, then tweak if necessary.

LAWoman72

yiscaht wrote: »

Thanks everyone, for the feedback. Guess I'll keep chugging along and re-evaluate in a few weeks, then tweak if necessary.

Sounds like a good plan! Let us know!

Mr_Knight

yiscaht wrote: »

Should I just not count the "exercise calories" and see if that helps?

It really depends on what kind of exercise you're doing and the accuracy of how you're counting. As a general rules, the smaller the deficit, the less important it is, and the more intense & prolonged the exercise, the more important it is.

There are MFPers who nail it pretty accurately, and others who are off by literally 10x - the latter should eat back zero.

So there's no trivial real-world answer to this.

ccam99

I do not eat them back but I do log exercise in MFP to keep track of my workouts. I just change the calorie count to "1". For me I don't want to feel I earned eating more because I worked out since it's hard sometimes to really know just how much you burned (unless you use a HRM and figure it out). I'd rather just know that on days I worked out I came in under calories.