Don't add eat exercise calories
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LOL this has been a huge topic in our household this week. I was on Weight Watchers and they discouraged people from eating their fit points. However if your exercise consists of a few gos around the block then sure you probably shouldn't eat them.. but if you are doing a spinning class 5x a week or some other equally vigorous workout then not eating them is probably going to do more harm than good. Its just finding the correct amount of extra calories to eat.. anyhow.. I believe you should eat them.. not all but some even the majority, if you are at the gym and putting in some effort. I have decided to stop WW after the conversation with the class leader and have booked an app with a nutritionist at my gym this weekend. I just want someone to tell me exactly how many calories I should eat a day lol as right now I have no clue if I am eating enough.. based on WW I know I was eating too few, and losing weight by starving myself isn't how I want to do it.
Exactly...MFP will give me about 1900 calories before exercise to lose 1 Lb per week...I'm an avid cycling enthusiast and for general fitness I ride 60-80 miles per week and more if I'm training for a race or other event. On Saturdays I usually put in a good 25-30 mile ride and will burn around 850-1,000 calories...if I just ate 1900 calories, that would leave me with a whopping 900-1,000 calories for my body to use for basic functions and going about my day...ultimately recovery would be a huge issue and so would performance and my health in general would suffer with that...and I'm doing all of this namely for my health.
I also lift 2-3x per week...failing to fuel my fitness would be an utter disaster. Fit people eat and train...11 -
Everyonelies wrote: »I have a question, mostly regarding Fitbit and calories, not sure if there is another post out there already....
I am set up with MFP to eat 1200cals a day, so far, so good...and based on the information, I do eat my calories back...mostly
BUT, for instance today, I have not worked out, but I already have an additional 14 calories from "exercise"...yes, 14 calories are close to nothing, but, they add up....once I walk close to my usual 10k steps for the day without an actual workout, I have a couple of hundred extra cals...plus whatever I burn on the treadmill/elliptical/stairmaster etc...
Are you eating 100% of your calories, regardless of the lack of exercise? Has this affected your gain/loss of muscle/weight?
I was used to just tracking my workout calories burned, but since Fitbit is so automatic, I was wondering how others deal with it...
I think a lot of the confusion here is because the same word can mean different things in different contexts.
Exercise is a thing some people do to burn calories, and for no other reason. It's also a thing people do to get big muscles or improve their fitness. All the time, you see people saying "exercise is this" or "exercise is for this" followed with "not that."
You burned 14 calories from walking. It wasn't from exercise to get fit, but it was legitimate energy that you spent moving your body. Maybe to go pee, I don't know.
"Intentional exercise" is a dumb standard. One time I got a flat tire on my bike and didn't have one of the tools I needed to fix it. So I walked a few miles back to my car with the bike. That was very much unintentional exercise, but it still burned calories. Just like your 14 non-workout calories.
I'm typing this to explain how it all works. On a practical level, 14 calories might be 1 raspberry, it's not worth worrying about. But the concept is worth understanding and being comfortable with.Everyonelies wrote: »Are you eating 100% of your calories, regardless of the lack of exercise? Has this affected your gain/loss of muscle/weight?
When you say "100 % of" that maybe gets a little confusing. I don't trust the number of calories my tracker thinks I burn when I walk, so I come up with a more realistic number and eat those. I'm not sure if that's a yes or a no. I trust my Garmin for bike calories, it will never be more than 5 % off, so I eat whatever it tells me. I've lost about 75 pounds this way.6 -
NorthCascades wrote: »This is bad advice.
It's not bad advice. I have a target of 1450. I get an extra 300 a day on average for exercise. If I eat 1750 I don't lose weight. If I eat 1450 I do lose weight. It's quite ok NOT to eat your exercise calories unless you are working out really hard and eating very little and have a massive deficit.
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EbonyDahlia wrote: »NorthCascades wrote: »This is bad advice.
It's not bad advice. I have a target of 1450. I get an extra 300 a day on average for exercise. If I eat 1750 I don't lose weight. If I eat 1450 I do lose weight. It's quite ok NOT to eat your exercise calories unless you are working out really hard and eating very little and have a massive deficit.
It depends on how you arrived at your "target".
If you used the MFP method, the reason you don't lose would be because you aren't burning 300 calories for that exercise.
This is one part people are missing, you have to have a reasonably accurate calculation of the burn, and the number MFP gives someone for exercise they manually enter is generally found to overestimate by about 50% or so. Numbers from something with a heart rate monitor are generally found to be fairly accurate. (Personal trial and error should be applied to fine tune.)
If however you got a target by total energy expended, then your target *already* counts those exercise calories, and if you eat them, you will indeed be over your intended deficit.
So for the OP to blanket say "dont eat exercise calories" is bad advice, because it does not apply to all situations/methods, and most certainly not to the method the MFP app uses. If you have a MFP derived target of 1450 and exercise off another 300 or 400 calories, you are netting only 1150 or even 1050, which is way too low for most people. eating those calories keeps you at exactly the target you set (with MFP).
Good advice would be to specify where (in which method) it is needed to eat them, and in which it is not.13 -
Everyonelies wrote: »I have a question, mostly regarding Fitbit and calories, not sure if there is another post out there already....
I am set up with MFP to eat 1200cals a day, so far, so good...and based on the information, I do eat my calories back...mostly
BUT, for instance today, I have not worked out, but I already have an additional 14 calories from "exercise"...yes, 14 calories are close to nothing, but, they add up....once I walk close to my usual 10k steps for the day without an actual workout, I have a couple of hundred extra cals...plus whatever I burn on the treadmill/elliptical/stairmaster etc...
Are you eating 100% of your calories, regardless of the lack of exercise? Has this affected your gain/loss of muscle/weight?
I was used to just tracking my workout calories burned, but since Fitbit is so automatic, I was wondering how others deal with it...
I have a polar tracker, so I don't know if it is different. I get 2 figures under exercise. One says calorie adjustment and the other specifies a particular exercise eg swimming. Those are my training sessions. The calorie adjustment is from day to day living. I used MFP when I set up my goal. So I do not generally eat back the calorie adjustment since I figured that that is already in my goal, however I do eat back the training calories since those were extra. I would not however stress myself if I didn't eat all of these back or if I go into the calorie adjustment so long as I am under goal. I am losing with this.
Basically I eat as much as I need to not feel hungry and have energy and no effects eg dizziness or nausea.0 -
The rub here is getting an accurate number of calories from your workout. I discussed in another thread the radical calorie burn difference I see between Map My Ride and my Polar HRM after a 30 mile bike ride.
Also, as was mentioned above, MFP gives a Polar calorie adjustment based, apparently, on the activity measure of my watch....and I delete it. Why take credit for something I didn't do?
I do allow myself to go over a bit my standard calorie level when my exercise cals show 500 or more and I put in a fairly hard workout, but I never eat them all back and have no adverse effects from doing it that way.1 -
Nobody has linked this yet?:
http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10503681/exercise-calories-do-i-eat-these-a-video-explanation/p18 -
gofaster01 wrote: »I wasn't loosing weight at first then I stopped adding my exercise calories to my goal calories. I still exercise but I don't add the extra calories to my intake and I lost 9 pounds.
It's better not to think about your exercise calories as somehow different from the rest of your calories. You should be aiming for a consistent calorie deficit. Some days that means exercising more. Some days that means eating less.3 -
CoachJen71 wrote: »I have a Fitbit and didn't eat my cals back. Lost way more muscle mass than I needed to!
This is why people should eat at least a portion of their exercise calories back. Enough so that they're losing at the expected rate of (healthy) loss.
You don't just lose fat when you lose weight, you also lose muscle tissue. When you lose weight too aggressively, you put yourself more at risk for increasing the amount of muscle you lose.
Unless you have purposely set up MFP to work using the TDEE method of loss, it is designed so that you should eat exercise calories back.
Advising people not to do so and/or acting like it's a good thing not to do so is bad, harmful advice.13 -
This is one of the most common questions here and I would respond - it depends.
If you are accurate in your caloric intake logs and accurate with you caloric burn estimations, then yes this is ideally the way MFP is designed to work. The problem is inherent with the inaccuracies of calorie estimations. What you want is to lose fat and retain muscle, so it is more important to note the rate of loss. Equally important is incorporating some manner of resistance training to protect the muscle mass you have.
Trained professionals are known to underestimate caloric intake and the industry margin of error on calorie estimation is 20%, so this is why you get the responses to not eat back exercise calories. Note that you also typically get these responses in the "Why am I not losing weight?" posts. Context is key.1 -
EbonyDahlia wrote: »NorthCascades wrote: »This is bad advice.
It's not bad advice. I have a target of 1450. I get an extra 300 a day on average for exercise. If I eat 1750 I don't lose weight. If I eat 1450 I do lose weight. It's quite ok NOT to eat your exercise calories unless you are working out really hard and eating very little and have a massive deficit.
A 300 calorie burn generally means I was working out pretty hard (that's ~ a 3.5-4 mile run for a non-obese female). I'm with Blitzia on this: I think the problem is with people over-estimating their burns (the 'intense yoga session' or 'I waddled around the grocery store for some extra minutes and my Fitbit says I burned a kazillion calories extra today' folks).2 -
2 people could weigh the same, same height etc, yet 1 could be all muscle and the other fat
The person that is fat would burn more doing the same exercise as the one that is healthy and all muscle
The best way is trial and error, start by doing what MFP says and then adjust as you go along1 -
2 people could weigh the same, same height etc, yet 1 could be all muscle and the other fat
The person that is fat would burn more doing the same exercise as the one that is healthy and all muscle
Not really true. A person with a higher muscle mass will have burn more calories as it does take more to maintain muscl than it does fat. But the difference is not a lot.The best way is trial and error, start by doing what MFP says and then adjust as you go along
Agreed. Keep at it for 4 weeks and gauge the results.
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EbonyDahlia wrote: »NorthCascades wrote: »This is bad advice.
It's not bad advice. I have a target of 1450. I get an extra 300 a day on average for exercise. If I eat 1750 I don't lose weight. If I eat 1450 I do lose weight. It's quite ok NOT to eat your exercise calories unless you are working out really hard and eating very little and have a massive deficit.
I burn that some days, some days a little more, some a little less depending on the workout. My workouts are also at least moderate intensity. If they it's one of the harder days I can get more like 400+. I have always eaten them I have always lost as intended. But my logging is accurate and after two years I know I can do that. I would bonk pretty quickly if I didn't eat them, particularly now my net is quite low.
A 300 calorie discrepancy is a pretty large one. It suggests both looser logging and over-estimated burns.12 -
I only brought up TBL as they pushed CICO and I watched it for entertainment value, some of the contestants are just nuts, not to mention watching them torture the contestants better than watching say Emmerdale/Coronation Street etc, unless you enjoy watching those type of shows
I have no idea re other methods of losing weight, ie cutting carbs or eating loads of fat etc, only what I have seen/read
I wasn't talking about maintaining the muscle but doing the same exercise, if they both say ran a mile or say weight lifting, the person that is fit and healthy would have burned less calories than the person that is unhealthy and fat as the effort needed would be less, how much would depend on their fitness levels
You know what I mean, for some people maintenance may well be 1500/1700 provided they did no exercise, i.e. For me when I hit my goal weight, it is 2000, if I only did a little exercise, so if I did none and just sat all day watching tv then it would be close to 1700
Not to mention the numbers given on the packaging is not 100%0 -
i walk 10-15 miles a day if i didnt add 300-500 more to my 1200 id lose way to quickly and be unhealthy and robbed of deliciusness...even then thats not alot of calories for my activities but im happy here and have been for almost a year....bad advice is bad6
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Looking only at calories ignores the metabolic effects of each calorie; the source of the calorie changes how you digest it and how you retrieve energy from it.0
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2 people could weigh the same, same height etc, yet 1 could be all muscle and the other fat
The person that is fat would burn more doing the same exercise as the one that is healthy and all muscle
The best way is trial and error, start by doing what MFP says and then adjust as you go along
Incorrect. Muscle burns (nominally) more calories than fat does. A pound of muscle burns about 6 calories per day, a pound of fat burns about two calories per day. In either case the difference isn't enough to have any significant effect except in extreme outliers almost beyond the scope of rational discussion - and nobody is "all muscle" or "all fat".7 -
I am talking about doing the same exercise not maintaining
And regarding the nobody is all muscle/fat, thank you for stating the obvious, that is an extreme example to make it clearer0 -
I work out 5-6x a week, 60 minutes, and I have found the days that I eat the majority of my exercise calories, the more weight I seem to drop overnight (then it balances back up for the next few days, then trends slowly back down to the original drop). I'm at a 1.5 lb a week loss, I just bought a scale earlier this week so I left more calories for cushioning for the past month (will eat more now, yay!), but at a 750 calorie deficiet, the most I should leave in my exercise calories is 250 if I can't eat most of them. I have a fitbit blaze, and it's accurate for me.0
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