Do I include exercise calories

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smiles3434
smiles3434 Posts: 3 Member
in Goal: Gaining Weight and Body Building
Just looking for clarification. I'm trying to gain about 8 lbs or so. I calculated my maintenance calories and entered that into mfp. I have myself as active in mfp with gaining .5 lb a week. Does mfp take that all into account when calculating my calories for the day? Do I need to take away the calories I get from exercise off my daily food total?

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  • cwolfman13
    cwolfman13 Posts: 41,871 Member
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    when you put yourself as "active" were you including your exercise?

    the way MFP is designed is for you to set your activity level based on your day to day without any exercise...then you log exercise and get additional calories to account for that activity. That said, if you put yourself as "active" based on day to day AND exercise then obviously exercise activity would be accounted for in your activity level.
  • smiles3434
    smiles3434 Posts: 3 Member
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    So they aren't already giving me "exercise" calories by describing myself as active? Am I double dipping then when I log in my exercise for the day ? Sorry I'm not clear on your question regarding whether I was including my exercise.
  • cwolfman13
    cwolfman13 Posts: 41,871 Member
    edited November 2015
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    smiles3434 wrote: »
    So they aren't already giving me "exercise" calories by describing myself as active? Am I double dipping then when I log in my exercise for the day ? Sorry I'm not clear on your question regarding whether I was including my exercise.

    when you stated "active" were YOU considering exercise as part of your activity? the calculator is just going to give you a target based on that activity level...it doesn't know if you were considering exercise or not when you selected your activity level.

    like i said before, as per the descriptors, the way MFP is set up is for you to set up your activity level based on your day to day hum drum without any exercise...but a lot of people just estimate their activity with exercise (including myself) because it's just easier to have a set calorie intake...if you do that then you would obviously be double dipping if you then logged exercise and ate those calories back. People like myself who include exercise in the activity level generally just log exercise as 1 calorie because it's already accounted for.

    it just depends on what your intentions were when you set your activity level...

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