"Eat back half your exercise calories"

AJF230

I've been using MFP for a week, though have been actively focused on nutrition and activity for a month now. Yesterday I identified a change that made me more comfortable eating exercise calories: I set my basic activity level to the lowest one. Then I make sure my tracker (in this case my phone) is with me wherever I walk. That captures my activity level accurately. I've been doing 8-12K steps per day. But just to be conservative I set my base activity as the lowest setting, and "let the chips fall where they may." eating back up to 3/4 of exercise is generally my comfort level. The conventional wisdom seems to be even if you eat back all exercise, you will lose weight, albeit slightly slower than your goal rate set.
After a month so far, my pants fit better, in that the elastic expansion is barely being used.

heybales

robertw486 wrote: »

CattOfTheGarage wrote: »

@heybales can you explain "50% deficit"? Do you mean someone who has a deficit that is half of their TDEE, so they're eating half as much as they need?

I won't speak for @heybales but I think you have it correct. I see it as well, people that are in such a hurry to lose weight that everything they do pushes them towards losing it faster. Long term rapid weight loss isn't a good thing, and can have negative consequences in regards to metabolic changes.

@CattOfTheGarage
That is indeed correct.

And I wouldn't classify it as half what they need, but rather half of what they could maintain on.
That line of what the body needs is below what it maintains on already.
And "needs" speaks to what you want the results to be.
You could eat very very little for the need for the body merely to survive. Not healthy though.
Do you need it to perform well, need it to transform well, need it to workout hard, need it to be energetic throughout day, need it to be healthy.

There are many that easily have a daily maintenance of normal non-exercise daily life of perhaps around 2000.
Then they start exercising a whole lot, and could maintain around 2400-2500 now on average.
But then they eat 1200 in total, and sometimes there miss the goal by 100-200 so as to be under.

So yes - easily eating 50% of what they could maintain on.

andream1976

I use TDEE which factors in my activity and my food and I've set MFP to NOT take into account any exercise that I log. I've found TDEE to be much more accurate and I like that my calorie goals remain the same every day. I felt like when I used MFP to calculate everything, I just exercised to eat MORE! Yes, you are allowed more calories if you are active, but not as a reward. lol You need those extra calories to fuel all that activity. I would go to Zumba for an hour and burn 700 calories, come home and log it and be like "Dang, I have to eat 1100 more calories before I go to bed!" Not exactly. Sooo, TDEE works much better for me. I recalculate every 10 pounds.

3dogsrunning

andream1976 wrote: »

I use TDEE which factors in my activity and my food and I've set MFP to NOT take into account any exercise that I log. I've found TDEE to be much more accurate and I like that my calorie goals remain the same every day. I felt like when I used MFP to calculate everything, I just exercised to eat MORE! Yes, you are allowed more calories if you are active, but not as a reward. lol You need those extra calories to fuel all that activity. I would go to Zumba for an hour and burn 700 calories, come home and log it and be like "Dang, I have to eat 1100 more calories before I go to bed!" Not exactly. Sooo, TDEE works much better for me. I recalculate every 10 pounds.

If figured correctly, MFP plus exercise and TDEE should average out to pretty much the same over the week. Some people like the consistency of the constant calorie goal with TDEE.
For me, when I wasn't exercising as consistently, I liked the MFP method. That way if I was under what my TDEE activity level was, I was ok.

Part of your problem with MFP plus exercise is the estimating calories. It is unlikely you burned 700 calories in an hour of Zumba (I know, I know, they say that that is the calorie burn).

Psychgrrl

I thought the fitness tracker study was interesting, mainly for a couple of reasons: 1) they didn't evaluate the Apple Watch and 2) none of the devices had chest strap heart rate monitors (only two devices had optical hrm, the rest had no hrm).

When I bought my Garmin Vivoactive 15 months ago, one of the main reasons I did so was the research I found saying the chest strap hrm were more accurate than the optical/wrist hrms. Manually taking my pulse, it seems very accurate when compared. The calorie burn also really seems to work for me.

Though I only count intentional exercise as exercise. Not cleaning, gardening, or the like. The steps taken during that stuff are counted and Garmin sends my steps over to MFP, but only gym/yoga/running sessions are counted as "exercise."

andream1976

3dogsrunning wrote: »

andream1976 wrote: »

I use TDEE which factors in my activity and my food and I've set MFP to NOT take into account any exercise that I log. I've found TDEE to be much more accurate and I like that my calorie goals remain the same every day. I felt like when I used MFP to calculate everything, I just exercised to eat MORE! Yes, you are allowed more calories if you are active, but not as a reward. lol You need those extra calories to fuel all that activity. I would go to Zumba for an hour and burn 700 calories, come home and log it and be like "Dang, I have to eat 1100 more calories before I go to bed!" Not exactly. Sooo, TDEE works much better for me. I recalculate every 10 pounds.

If figured correctly, MFP plus exercise and TDEE should average out to pretty much the same over the week. Some people like the consistency of the constant calorie goal with TDEE.
For me, when I wasn't exercising as consistently, I liked the MFP method. That way if I was under what my TDEE activity level was, I was ok.

Part of your problem with MFP plus exercise is the estimating calories. It is unlikely you burned 700 calories in an hour of Zumba (I know, I know, they say that that is the calorie burn).

I use a heart rate monitor during cardio and it consistently logs between 650-700 calories when I go to my local Zumba class. The class is an hour long. It's a killer workout.

Christine_72

andream1976 wrote: »

3dogsrunning wrote: »

andream1976 wrote: »

I use TDEE which factors in my activity and my food and I've set MFP to NOT take into account any exercise that I log. I've found TDEE to be much more accurate and I like that my calorie goals remain the same every day. I felt like when I used MFP to calculate everything, I just exercised to eat MORE! Yes, you are allowed more calories if you are active, but not as a reward. lol You need those extra calories to fuel all that activity. I would go to Zumba for an hour and burn 700 calories, come home and log it and be like "Dang, I have to eat 1100 more calories before I go to bed!" Not exactly. Sooo, TDEE works much better for me. I recalculate every 10 pounds.

If figured correctly, MFP plus exercise and TDEE should average out to pretty much the same over the week. Some people like the consistency of the constant calorie goal with TDEE.
For me, when I wasn't exercising as consistently, I liked the MFP method. That way if I was under what my TDEE activity level was, I was ok.

Part of your problem with MFP plus exercise is the estimating calories. It is unlikely you burned 700 calories in an hour of Zumba (I know, I know, they say that that is the calorie burn).

I use a heart rate monitor during cardio and it consistently logs between 650-700 calories when I go to my local Zumba class. The class is an hour long. It's a killer workout.

'/
Really? You must be doing super Zumba lol I would have figured around 350 calories max for an hour. Ofcourse it depends on your stats.

heybales

andream1976 wrote: »

3dogsrunning wrote: »

andream1976 wrote: »

I use TDEE which factors in my activity and my food and I've set MFP to NOT take into account any exercise that I log. I've found TDEE to be much more accurate and I like that my calorie goals remain the same every day. I felt like when I used MFP to calculate everything, I just exercised to eat MORE! Yes, you are allowed more calories if you are active, but not as a reward. lol You need those extra calories to fuel all that activity. I would go to Zumba for an hour and burn 700 calories, come home and log it and be like "Dang, I have to eat 1100 more calories before I go to bed!" Not exactly. Sooo, TDEE works much better for me. I recalculate every 10 pounds.

If figured correctly, MFP plus exercise and TDEE should average out to pretty much the same over the week. Some people like the consistency of the constant calorie goal with TDEE.
For me, when I wasn't exercising as consistently, I liked the MFP method. That way if I was under what my TDEE activity level was, I was ok.

Part of your problem with MFP plus exercise is the estimating calories. It is unlikely you burned 700 calories in an hour of Zumba (I know, I know, they say that that is the calorie burn).

I use a heart rate monitor during cardio and it consistently logs between 650-700 calories when I go to my local Zumba class. The class is an hour long. It's a killer workout.

Excellent job.

Zumba is in that class of workouts where you can easily get more efficient with the movements and burn a tad less for that reason - but all too easily not increase intensity to burn more or as you lose weight, to compensate.

When the movement is based on timing of swings, and you can only move so fast usually, that ability to keep increasing intensity to burn the same amount just isn't possible.

I've heard of some where they provide light weights to increase intensity - do they do that for your group?
Or just really good full body weight movements?