Should I eat additional calories from that come from exercise?

curlywurlie

Hello

After typing in my stats MFP suggests that in order for me to lose 1lb a week I should eat 1400 calories. If I do exersize and burn 500 calories, am I ok eating these or should I avoid it to lose weight? confused....
x

Ninkyou

Are you using mfp to calculate your calorie burns? If so, eat 50% of them back.

DemoraFairy

It's mostly up to you - some people eat back their exercise calories, some don't. MFP is designed so that you eat back your exercise calories, and you'll still lose weight if you do, but plenty of people choose not to. You'll lose weight quicker if you don't eat them back, but you want to make sure you're not eating too few calories (try to net at least 1200 calories a day). Personally I eat back all of mine as I'd never be able to stick to my calorie goal otherwise!

If you do eat them back, it's generally advised to eat back 50-80% of them depending on how you're calculating your exercise calories, since the MFP database and gym machines both tend to overestimate exercise calories. Activity trackers like Fitbits are generally more accurate, but still not perfect. I use a Fitbit and only do step-based exercise and trust it to be correct, and that's working for me so far.

curlywurlie

Yes using MFP to guide me on calories burnt. Although I do have a garmin watch I could use too. Thanks for the replies, very helpful x

callsitlikeiseeit

i eat back roughly half

pmm3437

I would only record calories burned from a device with a heart rate monitor. The entries in MFP are wildly inaccurate, because they are generic.

Most eat back a portion of the calories. What % you eat back should be based on how accurate you feel the burn estimate is.

I always recommend to at least try to get the extra protein on an exercise day.

juggernaut1974

Yes you should eat them back if you're using MFP to calculate your daily calorie goal.

However, you need to verify that the calorie burns calculated are accurate. MFP and most cardio machines notoriously overstate actual calorie burns, ergo the commonly dispensed advice is to eat only a portion of the calculated burns back.