Eating back exercise calories

yumi1

Can someone please tell me the Pro's and con's of eating back your exercise calories? I don't quite understand how its OK to eat back your calories when your trying to lose weight?

yumi1

**I don't understand

mecoconleche

I think it's if you feel like eating a bit more, the deficit ou incorporate into your diet will take care of almost everything, what you burn during exercise is the icing on the cake

MissusMoon

yumi1 wrote: »

Can someone please tell me the Pro's and con's of eating back your exercise calories? I don't quite understand how its OK to eat back your calories when your trying to lose weight?

Go by your hunger and energy levels. Typically folks eat back 25-75% if they are set to "sedentary". It's rarely recommended you eat back 100% because often they are over-estimated. If you've set yourself more active than sedentary those calories are already accounted for so you shouldn't. Also, don't double dip if you're using a fitness tracker.

whiskey_14

toady I was craving everything and anything, I went home and did week 3 of the 5K running app and satisfied my craving

bwogilvie

MFP's calorie goal excludes exercise. When you tell it your weight, height, age, gender, activity level, and weight loss goal, it gives you a calorie goal that you should meet with no exercise at all beyond your ordinary daily non-exercise activities. If you say that you want to lose 1 pound a week, that goal will be 500 calories below what you need to stay at a stable weight.

Now, imagine that you hike for an hour and burn 400 calories. You don't eat them back. If MFP were your sassy friend, it would say, "Hey, wait a minute, you told me you want to lose a pound a week, so I gave you a 500-calorie deficit. But you exercised, and didn't eat those calories, and now your deficit is 900 calories. WTF? Do you really want to lose 1.8 pounds per week? That's not what you told me earlier!!"

Of course, a lot of estimates of calorie burns are exaggerated, so many people eat back only 50-75% of exercise calories.

So the conclusion: you eat back your exercise calories in order to avoid losing weight too quickly, and being undernourished, hungry, and extremely crabby while doing so.

If you still have questions, this old post is well worth a read:
http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/818082/exercise-calories-again-wtf/p1 (caution: very mild profanity)

tantv79

@bwogilvie ... Great explanation!

CattOfTheGarage

I was going to post, but @bwogilvie nailed it.

jacquelynmireles

bwogilvie wrote: »

MFP's calorie goal excludes exercise. When you tell it your weight, height, age, gender, activity level, and weight loss goal, it gives you a calorie goal that you should meet with no exercise at all beyond your ordinary daily non-exercise activities. If you say that you want to lose 1 pound a week, that goal will be 500 calories below what you need to stay at a stable weight.

Now, imagine that you hike for an hour and burn 400 calories. You don't eat them back. If MFP were your sassy friend, it would say, "Hey, wait a minute, you told me you want to lose a pound a week, so I gave you a 500-calorie deficit. But you exercised, and didn't eat those calories, and now your deficit is 900 calories. WTF? Do you really want to lose 1.8 pounds per week? That's not what you told me earlier!!"

Of course, a lot of estimates of calorie burns are exaggerated, so many people eat back only 50-75% of exercise calories.

So the conclusion: you eat back your exercise calories in order to avoid losing weight too quickly, and being undernourished, hungry, and extremely crabby while doing so.

If you still have questions, this old post is well worth a read:
http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/818082/exercise-calories-again-wtf/p1 (caution: very mild profanity)

AMAZING! LOL!

katiebean

CattOfTheGarage wrote: »

I was going to post, but @bwogilvie nailed it.

Same! MFP is DESIGNED for you to eat back your exercise calories. I typically eat back 50% but sometimes 100%.

sijomial

MissusMoon wrote: »

yumi1 wrote: »

Can someone please tell me the Pro's and con's of eating back your exercise calories? I don't quite understand how its OK to eat back your calories when your trying to lose weight?

Go by your hunger and energy levels. Typically folks eat back 25-75% if they are set to "sedentary". It's rarely recommended you eat back 100% because often they are over-estimated. If you've set yourself more active than sedentary those calories are already accounted for so you shouldn't. Also, don't double dip if you're using a fitness tracker.

@missusmoon
Nope - sorry that's incorrect.
Activity setting and exercise are completely separate entities on here.

Activity setting is your job/lifestyle, nothing to do with how much you exercise at all.

I have a sedentary job but exercise 3500 - 7000 cals a week which I eat back. My activity setting is still sedentary.

A builder/construction worker (for example) would have a higher activity setting but still eat back their exercise calories on top of that.

LivingtheLeanDream

Think of exercise as a way of increasing the calories you get to eat yet still lose weight.

MFP is set up so you loss X amount on X calories. When you exercise you boost your calorie allowance, perfectly normal and a nice bonus imo.

Of course the exercise burns are inclined to be over estimated so that's why we'll tell you to eat 50-75% of your exercise calories.

There's no greater incentive to get moving than knowing you are increasing your deficit and that you can eat back some of those extra calories

The pros of eating them back is that you are fuelling your body properly so it will have the energy to keep going.
Having too large a deficit is not healthy and I'm not sure why anyone wouldn't want to eat that bit more and still have success losing weight.

When I was in my losing phase I always ate back most of my exercise calories. Been in maintenance for 3+ years and love that I can maintain my weight eating up to 2300 calories a day (I'm only 5ft 2).

The winner is the person who can still eat plenty and yet lose

veganbaum

MissusMoon wrote: »

yumi1 wrote: »

Can someone please tell me the Pro's and con's of eating back your exercise calories? I don't quite understand how its OK to eat back your calories when your trying to lose weight?

Go by your hunger and energy levels. Typically folks eat back 25-75% if they are set to "sedentary". It's rarely recommended you eat back 100% because often they are over-estimated. If you've set yourself more active than sedentary those calories are already accounted for so you shouldn't. Also, don't double dip if you're using a fitness tracker.

You've been provided excellent explanations.

Since it's been a loooong time since I've read the "wtf" thread, I don't remember if it addresses this. I just want to point out that the explanation above is not accurate. The activity level you choose on MFP is supposed to account for your daily life without exercise. Typically, a person who sits at a desk all day is sedentary, whereas someone who is on their feet all day is not sedentary - their activity level will vary from lightly active to very active (but these are estimates; I have a type of desk job, but most days with minimal movement I should at least be categorized as lightly active). Each person is still supposed to account for their exercise, because it is beyond their daily life activity level.

Also, I only know about Fitbit because I have one, but if I were to log exercise separately it would not be double dipping. Fitbit would override that time period so the calories are not double-counted. I would assume other activity trackers would be the same, but I don't know.

CattOfTheGarage

But there are entries in the exercise database for things like "manual work", and I know my father, who is an electrician, logs his electrical work as exercise. So it depends what you count as exercise, and there is a real possibility of people with active jobs accidentally logging the same activity twice, once via activity level, once via exercise tracking.

veganbaum

CattOfTheGarage wrote: »

But there are entries in the exercise database for things like "manual work", and I know my father, who is an electrician, logs his electrical work as exercise. So it depends what you count as exercise, and there is a real possibility of people with active jobs accidentally logging the same activity twice, once via activity level, once via exercise tracking.

That's a user "error." Not really an error if they're doing it intentionally and understand what they're doing (just like those users who set their calorie goal based on TDEE), but it's incorrect to simply state that if you choose an activity level higher than sedentary you've already accounted for your exercise.

cwolfman13

yumi1 wrote: »

Can someone please tell me the Pro's and con's of eating back your exercise calories? I don't quite understand how its OK to eat back your calories when your trying to lose weight?

Because your calorie target includes your weight loss deficit with no exercise whatsoever. Exercise then becomes an unaccounted for additional activity. Fueling your fitness is important...failure to fuel your fitness retards fitness gains...the purpose and point of exercise is fitness, not burning calories...that's just a nice bi-product. When you start looking at fitness for the sake of fitness, things make more sense.

Let's say I set my goal to lose 1 Lb per week...MFP would give me about 1900 calories which means MFP is estimating my maintenance WITHOUT exercise to be 2,400 calories. Now lets say I go out for a kick *kitten* ride on my bike and torch around 600 calories...if I didn't eat those, my deficit would be larger than what my stated goal was which is not always a good thing as excessive deficits result in greater loss of lean mass to fat mass than otherwise...so I eat my 600 calories but I'll still lose that same Lb per week because my maintenance number would go from 2400 to 3,000...so with that new maintenance number I'm going to lose about 1 Lb per week eating 2,500 calories.