need advice am i eating enough

chellebelle272

ok hi everyone

my name is michelle and im 5'4 and 179 pounds and ive been reading several posts and im just not sure if im eating enough calories . i do jillian micheals body shredd im doing my second round of it . mon tues thurs friday i also jogg 2miles in about 30 mins on those days then sat i jog slash walk 4 miles in about an hour. son tues thursdays i walk 2 miles with my son aftr work and then on sundays we walk a 3 mile trail. wed is the only day i take off from workouts . i am a banker so i average on workout days 10,000 - 11000 steps a day and on non workout days its about 4000-6000. i have a vivo active hr T that monitors my heart rate and burn on workout days i burn about 2500 calories on none work out i burn 16-1700 . i set my myfitness pal to loosing 1 pound a week and it set me at 1400 calories . should i eat back my exercise calories . whats the difference between bmr and tdee on wed which is a non workout day in always starving . im looking to get down to 135. any advice or experiecnes would be great

CoffeeNCardio

MFP is set up for you to eat back your exercise calories. It should be adding them to your total automatically and it does expect you to eat them. Most people only eat about half of their exercise calories back because the adjustments are a little overblown, so you could start there and work up to eating them all back, unless it interferes with your loss. It's a waiting game, you have to try eating back half for a while, then up it to maybe 3/4, then wait and see what the result is on the scale. That's how you find out what works the best.

janejellyroll

MFP is designed to eat back your exercise calories. If your calorie goal comes from MFP, you should strongly consider eating back at least some of them so that you properly fuel your activity and avoid unwanted consequences like lack of energy or excessive hunger.

You're always starving because you aren't eating enough. You aren't eating enough because you're using MFP in a way that it wasn't designed to be used.

CoffeeNCardio

BMR is your body's basal metabolic rate. That's how many calories you burn just existing, breathing, running your organs, digesting, stuff you do that's not exercise and not daily normal activity like getting up to go pee or walking upstairs to your bedroom. It's bodily functions.

TDEE is your total daily energy expenditure. This is your work out, your normal daily activity, and BMR all rolled into one.

MFP uses NEAT, which is something in between. Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. So that's your BMR (bodily functions) PLUS daily activity (walking to your bathroom, folding laundry, etc). So any exercise you do is not counted until you add it after the fact. NEAT plus your added exercise is your TDEE, from which MFP calculates how much less you should eat than that number to lose to your goal.

Aaron_K123

Ideally to lose 1 pound a week you want to be eating 500 less than your TDEE per day. The difficulty is in determining your TDEE. If your fitness tracker is to be believed your TDEE is 2500 on workout days and 1700 on non-workout. Sounds like you workout 4 days a week so that would be an average TDEE of 2150 per day. If your TDEE averages 2150 then you would want to be eating 1650 per day for 1 pound loss per week.

Question is whether your TDEE estimate is right, whether its overestimated or underestimated. The only way to figure that out is to pick a number of calories to eat (say 1650) and eat that very consistantly over a period of say 5 weeks and see what your weight loss is then correct from there.

Speaking in general with MFP yes you should eat your exercise calories back, its just difficult to accurately measure what exercise calories actually are.

RoxieDawn

OP this link provides information you asked about BMR and TDEE.. This and many other links to valuable information are found in the stickies at the beginning of the forums.

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/931670/bmr-and-tdee-explained-for-those-needing-a-guide/p1

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/818082/exercise-calories-again-wtf/p1

chellebelle272

My diary is open if anyone wants to take a look at how much exercise im getting in