Calories from exercise

ruggedshutter

Personally, I don't eat mine back though I'm not using the NEAT method, rather TDEE

uvi5

futuremanda wrote: »

MFP intends for you to eat them, that's why it gives them back to you!

Basically, it has no way of knowing ahead of time how much you plan to exercise, and if you will follow through. If MFP were say, your own personal trainer, it would probably help you set a target to burn a set number of calories in a week, and then figure that in when picking a calorie target to eat. But it can't know, so it gives you an appropriate target that would get you to your goal without exercise. When you exercise, it then gives you that back -- that way, you aren't underfuelled.

Ex. If it knew you were going to burn an extra 300 a day, it would just tell you to eat 1500. But it learns of the 300 after the fact, so you "eat it back". But it's really the same thing as saying "eat 1500 and burn off 300 a day".

Beware of potential overestimates on the burns though. Many people start by eating 50-75% or just eating as many as they feel they need, when they need them.

Oh and if you don't like the 1200 target, and would be fine to lose a bit more slowly, you can always just up your target. If 100-200 calories would up your quality of life, it may be worth it for you.

^This

PAV8888

Indigoblu1 wrote: »

1592984904984984089984980 wrote: »

Why eat the calories you burn and slow your progress down?

This is what I think, too.

The most annoying thing to me about 1592984904984984089984980;32157277 is that every time I try to quote the damn guy, his posts have already been removed by the moderators. I have some nice IP address detection code for you guys if you even need it...

I am thinking of turning a post I just made in another thread into a blog post, and there's some knowledgeable people in this thread already... maybe I'll re-post it and you guys can poke any major holes?

PAV8888

Here it goes:

If you setup MFP as it guides you to, you are supposed to eat back your true net exercise calories because MFP already includes your target deficit in the numbers it gives you.

This is particularly true if you've set yourself as sedentary when you are not. For example if you are hitting more then 3,500 to 5,000 steps during your daily living you should probably be setup as light active.

The reason people suggest just a portion of your exercise calories instead of a 100% eat back is because of the potential errors in this process.

First you may not always be logging your food accurately because of your database entry choices, incorrect estimates of food serving sizes, variability of the nutritional value of the food you eat, manufacturers lying about the calories their food contains in the first place, or plain variability in the manufacturing process.

Secondly exercise calories are hard to estimate and many machines and online calculators give you what appear to be the wrong values.

Often this is because you did not enter your stats on the machine. Almost always it is because you are getting the gross caloric burn for the total time you spent exercising.

You need the net burn instead, because the "I was alive during this execise hour" portion of your calories has already been accounted for in your MFP base calories.

Sometimes the manufacturers inflates their values because they want to make themselves look kick ***** and you to feel good about your efforts. And lastly it could be that the burn value is too high for you, specifically, because as our muscles adapt to the types of exercise we perform often, they become more efficient. This can reduce the true calories burned for a given intensity and time by up to 20%.

So people guess that eating back just 50% to 75% of exercise calories will cover all these errors!

The case of all day trackers is different than just adding a single exercise burn estimate.

The trackers make an independent guess as to you TDEE (living plus exercise) for the whole day based on their proprietary formula and this estimate is then compared with MFP's.

In my opinion you should enter purposeful exercise beyond daily living in both the tracker and MFP. If the sync operation is working correctly the exercise activities you enter in both will NOT be double counted.

When the tracker connects with MFP you get a positive adjustment if the tracker thinks your total day burned more calories than what MFP figured out for you. This is the only time you will get a positive adjustment and having your exercise on both sides of the equation will not affect your total calories, it will just reduce the size of the adjustment.

If you enable negative adjustments you are telling MFP to butt out of the estimating business and to just go ahead and use the tracker's values both up and down.

Negative adjustments should not be enabled if you're setup as sedentary in MFP, unless you really have a reason not to trust MFPs sedentary estimate. You are extremely unlikely to be burning less than that!

And now we come to the trust but verify part.

Everything in this process is based on estimates upon estimates and has measurement errors... including your scale! But, if that's all we got, that's all we got to go with! Lemons, lemonades : - )

You do all this for 2-4 weeks and you observe your results.

Are you medically classified as overweight, or obese, and losing at between 0.5% and 1% of your body weight per week? Then keep on doing what you're doing and modify your eat back only to ensure compliance, and to meet your goals.

Are you losing at above 1% and you are not classified as medically obese? You're going too fast and quite possibly losing more fat free mass than you have to.