Calories from exercise

ChrisM8971

1592984904984984089984980 wrote: »

Why eat the calories you burn and slow your progress down? Have self control!

You are making the assumption that faster is better and thats not always the case.

Sued0nim

Unless you have overwritten the MFP calories with a cut from TDEE you are SUPPOSED to eat them back

But be careful if using the MFP database ...it overestimates so best to cut back to 50 or 75% of burns
Judge this against your rate of weight loss over 6-8 weeks if you're losing quicker than your target eat more, if slower eat fewer

You eat them back because
1) you need to protect as much LBM as possible as you lose weight
2) it will expand your diet and help you stick to it ...the lower the deprivation the less willpower is needed
3) you need to fuel your body for exercise and to gain strength
4) when you hit maintenance you will be able to eat higher calories
5) you set a goal weight loss per week, unless you are morbidly obese then anything over 2lbs a week is ill-advised, if you have less to lose you should cut the rate so that your last 20lbs you're at about 0.5lbs a week
6) at the end of the day the one who loses weight whilst eating the most wins

lemurcat12

1592984904984984089984980 wrote: »

Why eat the calories you burn and slow your progress down? Have self control!

For the same reason no one responsible (for example, as the person above explained, if you did it with a hired professional, and I'd add, a nutritionist) would ever set a calorie goal based on "how little do I think I could manage to eat," but instead would look at overall estimated calorie burn, which includes exercise.

As the person above explained quite well, if you do it in the other way you include estimated movement upfront, so there's no risk that you will be burning far more calories than the calorie goal is estimated to account for. Choosing a calorie goal that is typically the minimum calories MFP will give (based on what it would take to lose 2 lbs if sedentary and not exercising) and then to exercise on top is to ignore all advice that is typically given about healthy weight loss goals.

But some people seem to think that it's somehow better to eat as little as possible and that you should shame people (the "have self control" comment) who are trying to do it as MFP is designed.

decotterell

I generally don't eat back the calories, but I have had to increase mine to maintain my current weight. I'm still exercising a lot, but it's too early to tell if I'm going to need to up my calories more. As long as I wanted to lose though, I kept with the recommended daily intake.

callsitlikeiseeit

sometimes i eat them back, sometimes i dont. depends on how i FEEL.

when i was at 1200 calories though, i ate back every single one. i was a hungry, mean, *kitten* LOL.

im losing at the same rate eating between 1500-1800 and am much much happier. and much less hungry. LOL

kellyannecandy

Thanks again everybody. Thinking about it, its obvious really isn't it.......because as fitness levels improve and the exercising increases we'll be burning more and more calories. So the 1200 calories won't go that far if you're burning say 600 (not that I will be anytime soon! haha)
I'm going to go with eating some of them back and see how it goes

snowflakesav

I eat some of them back. If need the energy .

lemurcat12

kellyannecandy wrote: »

I'm going to go with eating some of them back and see how it goes

That's a good way to do it. I didn't eat many back at first, since I didn't realize I should and was not all that active anyway. As I got more active and got more confident that I'd lose as predicted even eating them back I started doing so (depending on the exercise--I ate most running calories, about half of my biking calories, cut other things various amounts), and the pleasant aspect of that is that I ended up eating more as I went on, despite the lost weight. It made the whole thing more sustainable over time, and now I can basically ease into eating at maintenance.

mwyvr

Newbie here... but I've been on my get-fit-again program since last September so I'm not new to making a change in my life. I credit the simple activity tracking in Google Fit, and the free running / cycling tracking in Strava, for keeping me motivated and reaching higher, especially in the early days when physical progress was near impossible for me to detect.

Honestly I only this week have started to look at input calories as for the past nine months I've been totally focussed on making exercise the regular part of my life it once was. I figure now I've got that solidly hammered back into my being... yay.

Lately I've been fitting in 3 or 4 runs a week averaging 35km - 40km a week. My dog is much happier now too.

My experience is that if I'm working out on a regular basis I need to fuel the machine appropriately. If I don't, I'll either perform poorly (re my own expectations) or, worse, might see my resolve wane some and end up skipping a workout(s). Either case can lead to setback, yet when fuelled right even a downpour won't keep me in.

llUndecidedll

Sometimes, I think its best to not even know how many calories I burn from exercise because I truly never feel hungry, but I'm more likely to think/feel like I am because I know I just burned X amount of calories doing something I half-way dislike. Drinking a liter of water usually kills that feeling I have that makes me think I'm hungry.

But, yeah, I do eat back my exercise calories most days. I'm trying to get away from that altogether.

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.