Activity Settings vs "Eating Back" Exercise Calories

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Replies

  • mrstrod1
    mrstrod1 Posts: 17 Member
    @NorthCascades - so I should not have between 400 & 700 remaining each day? Would I lose about a pound a week if I ate the 1660 goal AND the 674 exercise calories from Yesterday? That means I should have really eaten 2334 calories yesterday? More confused now! :(
  • Christine_72
    Christine_72 Posts: 16,049 Member
    edited June 2017
    mrstrod1 wrote: »
    Ok, so I have read this whole thread and I am still confused. I still don't understand the "eating" back your exercise thing. If you are trying to have a deficit, how else would you get it? Seriously I'm not being a smart-alec, I just don't get how I'm supposed to use the numbers MFP gives me.

    First let me give you my facts...
    I have been Working at getting healthier for 3 month and lost about 24 pounds (initially I was doing more than 2 pounds a week but after researching about lean tissue and sagging skin, I slowed down so that only about 6 pounds were from this past month).

    My "normal" activity can range anywhere from 1200 steps to 15000 steps - some days I am a full time student at my PC all day and others I am a maniac mom on the run).

    My exercise is as follows (I am religious with my schedule):
    Crossfit for between 45 and 60 minutes Monday, Wednesday & Friday.
    Crossfit and weight training with personal trainer for 60 minutes Tuesday & Thursday.
    Walk/Run between 2 and 3.5 miles Tuesday, Thursday & Saturday (when I say walk run, I mostly walk but at a pace that is just shy being out of breath - heart-rate up in the mid to high 140's. keep in mind I'm so short my run is not much faster than my walk).

    So, my MFP settings are:
    Age/sex: 45 Female
    Current weight 195.3
    Height: 4ft. 11in.
    Goal weight: 140
    Weekly Goal: lose 1lb per week
    Activity level: Lightly Active

    This was yesterday (typical day for exercise cals is between 400 & 700)
    Goal 1660 - food 1574 + exercise 674 = 760 remaining (so am I not really supposed to have the 760 remaining? was I supposed to eat those too?

    1- do I have my settings set right?
    2- am I supposed to eat the 760 calories I had remaining? (I would be so FULL!)
    3- am I doing anything right? (I mean, I know I've lost weight but seriously I NEVER exercised before starting).

    How much weight do you have to lose? If you're set at 1660 calories to lose 2lbs a week, then you have eaten more than 1660 + 760-=2420 calories in the past without getting overly full.

    If you burned it, you earned it :smiley:
  • lynn_glenmont
    lynn_glenmont Posts: 10,097 Member
    mrstrod1 wrote: »
    Ok, so I have read this whole thread and I am still confused. I still don't understand the "eating" back your exercise thing. If you are trying to have a deficit, how else would you get it? Seriously I'm not being a smart-alec, I just don't get how I'm supposed to use the numbers MFP gives me.

    First let me give you my facts...
    I have been Working at getting healthier for 3 month and lost about 24 pounds (initially I was doing more than 2 pounds a week but after researching about lean tissue and sagging skin, I slowed down so that only about 6 pounds were from this past month).

    My "normal" activity can range anywhere from 1200 steps to 15000 steps - some days I am a full time student at my PC all day and others I am a maniac mom on the run).

    My exercise is as follows (I am religious with my schedule):
    Crossfit for between 45 and 60 minutes Monday, Wednesday & Friday.
    Crossfit and weight training with personal trainer for 60 minutes Tuesday & Thursday.
    Walk/Run between 2 and 3.5 miles Tuesday, Thursday & Saturday (when I say walk run, I mostly walk but at a pace that is just shy being out of breath - heart-rate up in the mid to high 140's. keep in mind I'm so short my run is not much faster than my walk).

    So, my MFP settings are:
    Age/sex: 45 Female
    Current weight 195.3
    Height: 4ft. 11in.
    Goal weight: 140
    Weekly Goal: lose 1lb per week
    Activity level: Lightly Active

    This was yesterday (typical day for exercise cals is between 400 & 700)
    Goal 1660 - food 1574 + exercise 674 = 760 remaining (so am I not really supposed to have the 760 remaining? was I supposed to eat those too?

    1- do I have my settings set right?
    2- am I supposed to eat the 760 calories I had remaining? (I would be so FULL!)
    3- am I doing anything right? (I mean, I know I've lost weight but seriously I NEVER exercised before starting).

    You're really not supposed to have the 760 remaining. You were supposed to eat those, too, or at least most of them (I might start at eating back half of the calories, because many methods of calculating calorie burns seem to overestimate, but 674 doesn't seem insane for an hour of crossfit + weight training and then a two-mile or more walk.

    MFP already includes a deficit based on what you would burn without intentional exercise. It is designed for you to eat your exercise calories.

    Look at it this way. Your goal is to lose 1 lb per week, but in the last month you've been losing 1.5 lbs a week. That says you should be eating an average of 250 calories more each day. (Was today average?)
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 14,311 Member
    peaceout_aly wrote: »
    I agree with the vast response of people not understanding the difference between lightly active and sedentary. People think if they go to the gym after sitting for 8+ hours a day at an office job (plus commute) that they are lightly active, and then go ahead and log their exercise on top of that. Not the case. I work out for 2+ hours x day between at home dumbbell/band work/stretching, cardio and in-gym machine/barbell work and I still have my settings at sedentary because what do I do the rest of the day? Sit at my computer and do my job. If I were a construction worker or something like that it'd be more reasonable to have lightly active as a setting. People just need to grasp that concept. So when taking that into perspective it may be good for them to do stuff "just to be safe"

    For the purpose of calculating calories out:
    activity setting = pick a number of calories that you THINK you will burn during your day.
    exercise = the rest of the activities that burn calories and were NOT included in your activity setting number.

    really: it doesn't have any higher religious significance.

    IF you walk for 45 minutes back and forth from school or your car or at home talking on the phone... sedentary is done.

    If you're moving around for a couple of hours (and you're NOT recording that separately as exercise) you're firmly in the active category.

    if you count your lunch hour walk as exercise AND use it to get you out of sedentary and into lightly active, YES, you've double counted.

    The amount of people who don't move around for even one full hour during a day is staggering and has included myself during a large portion of my adult life. Sedentary might be appropriate in this case.

    Note that, technically, between 45 minutes and 1 hour you're verging on lightly active).

    MFP activity factors are 1.25, 1.4, 1.6 and 1.8 and then you add whatever was not included

    Scooby activity factors are 1.2, 1.375, 1.55, 1.725 and 1.9 and you are supposed to have included everything

    It is just factor x BMR

    Nothing magical.

    Just a rough estimate that you should adjust based on your own results using a trending weight application over a period of 2-3 (male/post menopause) or 4-6 (pre-menopausal females) weeks

    Frankly, as someone else mentioned, our food intake logs are probably a larger source of error.
  • estherdragonbat
    estherdragonbat Posts: 5,283 Member
    I choose sedentary because I spend all day in front of my computer. I'm a freelance editor working from home. Now, I push myself to exercise and, because I work from home and because I don't actually have much work these days, I can get in walks of 2+ hours. And I track every minute of walking I do outside the house. 15-minute grocery store runs? They add up. I also use a fitness glider. I don't count the calories in pure strength training, but if it's a cardio-and-weights interval thing? I log it under 'light calisthenics'. But all of this is stuff I choose to do, not exercise I'd get by virtue of being on my feet all day.

    So I figure sedentary is the best setting for me, and I'm losing weight at around the rate I should be on average. (One week I might be down 0.2, the week after 2.2. I'm shooting for 1 to 1.5.)
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 14,311 Member
    mrstrod1 wrote: »
    So, my MFP settings are:
    Age/sex: 45 Female
    Current weight 195.3
    Height: 4ft. 11in.
    Goal weight: 140
    Weekly Goal: lose 1lb per week
    Activity level: Lightly Active

    This was yesterday (typical day for exercise cals is between 400 & 700)
    Goal 1660 - food 1574 + exercise 674 = 760 remaining (so am I not really supposed to have the 760 remaining? was I supposed to eat those too?

    1- do I have my settings set right?
    2- am I supposed to eat the 760 calories I had remaining? (I would be so FULL!)
    3- am I doing anything right? (I mean, I know I've lost weight but seriously I NEVER exercised before starting).

    1. See above about what is included or not included in setting yourself up correctly. Whether you're lightly active, sedentary, or active depends on which and how much of your exercise you log separately.

    2. You are supposed to eat a significant portion of the exercise calories back IF you want to lose at the rate you selected. I think the problem here is that your exercise level is now through the roof as compared to before and you can probably eat more today and lose than you were probably eating in the past while gaining.

    3. You're doing a lot of things right and you've discovered that you were sedentary for a large part of your life and are now having fun with exercise.

    However, you have to watch things a little bit so that you don't end up in a trap. I know that people are going to consider the following to probably be a little bit controversial... but...

    You are exercising every day intensely and sometimes doing two sessions a day. This (and the extra food and weight loss it gives you) will work great till the first big injury or big life event that derails you for a significant period of time.

    My advice is to figure out the level of exercise that you truly believe you can stick to LONG TERM. Like 5+ years. Maybe even 10!

    Then maybe exercise a little bit more than that... but not a heck of a lot more than that.

    And eat according to the calories that a person at your goal weight who was doing as much or a tiny bit less exercise/activity than you intend to do long term...

    To your implied question: if you over exercise and under eat longer term your body will partially adapt thus reducing your underlying deficit and rate of loss.
  • gamerbabe14
    gamerbabe14 Posts: 876 Member
    estherdragonbat wrote: »
    I choose sedentary because I spend all day in front of my computer. I'm a freelance editor working from home. Now, I push myself to exercise and, because I work from home and because I don't actually have much work these days, I can get in walks of 2+ hours. And I track every minute of walking I do outside the house. 15-minute grocery store runs? They add up. I also use a fitness glider. I don't count the calories in pure strength training, but if it's a cardio-and-weights interval thing? I log it under 'light calisthenics'. But all of this is stuff I choose to do, not exercise I'd get by virtue of being on my feet all day.

    So I figure sedentary is the best setting for me, and I'm losing weight at around the rate I should be on average. (One week I might be down 0.2, the week after 2.2. I'm shooting for 1 to 1.5.)

    We do pretty much the same thing...minus the glider thing. I am losing consistently.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,622 Member
    mrstrod1 wrote: »
    Ok, so I have read this whole thread and I am still confused. I still don't understand the "eating" back your exercise thing. If you are trying to have a deficit, how else would you get it? Seriously I'm not being a smart-alec, I just don't get how I'm supposed to use the numbers MFP gives me.

    First let me give you my facts...
    I have been Working at getting healthier for 3 month and lost about 24 pounds (initially I was doing more than 2 pounds a week but after researching about lean tissue and sagging skin, I slowed down so that only about 6 pounds were from this past month).

    My "normal" activity can range anywhere from 1200 steps to 15000 steps - some days I am a full time student at my PC all day and others I am a maniac mom on the run).

    My exercise is as follows (I am religious with my schedule):
    Crossfit for between 45 and 60 minutes Monday, Wednesday & Friday.
    Crossfit and weight training with personal trainer for 60 minutes Tuesday & Thursday.
    Walk/Run between 2 and 3.5 miles Tuesday, Thursday & Saturday (when I say walk run, I mostly walk but at a pace that is just shy being out of breath - heart-rate up in the mid to high 140's. keep in mind I'm so short my run is not much faster than my walk).

    So, my MFP settings are:
    Age/sex: 45 Female
    Current weight 195.3
    Height: 4ft. 11in.
    Goal weight: 140
    Weekly Goal: lose 1lb per week
    Activity level: Lightly Active

    This was yesterday (typical day for exercise cals is between 400 & 700)
    Goal 1660 - food 1574 + exercise 674 = 760 remaining (so am I not really supposed to have the 760 remaining? was I supposed to eat those too?

    1- do I have my settings set right?
    That's hard for anyone else to answer, but as long as those facts are true, yes. Activity level is always a bit of a guess, but experience will tell you if you need to adjust. The activity level should reflect your work & routine home chores, but not intentional exercise you add separately.
    2- am I supposed to eat the 760 calories I had remaining? (I would be so FULL!)
    Yes, you are, as long as you have confidence that the exercise calories are not overestimated. (They don't sound crazy high, but again it's hard for a 3rd party to guess whether something that sounds possible is what's really happening.)

    MFP calculates your base calorie goal so that it thinks you'd lose 1 pound a week (per your goal setting) without any exercise. Therefore, when you exercise, you "eat back" the exercise calories to stay at the estimated 1 pound per week loss rate, rather than losing more.

    (At your current weight, with around 50 pounds to lose, 1 pound per week is a sensible loss rate. You might want to slow it a bit more when you get 15-25 pounds from goal. Be aware that loss rates are estimates, so you should adjust your calorie goal - perhaps by tweaking activity level - if your actual average loss after a few weeks is faster or slower than your target.)

    If you feel full, consider adding calorie dense foods that are not too satiating for you, such as some nuts, a little extra olive oil on salad, avocado, or a small treat like chocolate, wine, or ice cream.
    3- am I doing anything right? (I mean, I know I've lost weight but seriously I NEVER exercised before starting).
    [/b]
    It sounds like you're doing very well in general. :) Your exercise routine sounds quite ambitious, in fact, for someone new to it. If it fits into your overall life well, is fun for you, and seems like something you can sustain over the long haul, then that's absolutely perfect.

    I'm a big believer that weight loss is just practice for a permanent healthier life, so I don't advocate doing things during weight loss that one can't visualize doing forever, other than the moderate calorie deficit. That way, transition to maintenance is a simple matter of eating a few more calories daily, rather than some major upheaval of habits. Others' opinions may differ! ;)
  • SusanMFindlay
    SusanMFindlay Posts: 1,804 Member
    It's also worth noting that if you have a lot of calories left at the end of the day because you were more active than usual, there's no rule that says you have to eat them on that same day. If you're not hungry and would prefer to save them for the next day (when you might be hungrier) or a special event a couple of days later, your body will not care. It will only care if you consistently undereat.
  • heybales
    heybales Posts: 18,842 Member
    mrstrod1 wrote: »
    @NorthCascades - so I should not have between 400 & 700 remaining each day? Would I lose about a pound a week if I ate the 1660 goal AND the 674 exercise calories from Yesterday? That means I should have really eaten 2334 calories yesterday? More confused now! :(

    You are probably thinking about almost every other weight loss app out there.

    You estimate your PLANNED amount of weekly exercise - you get a daily average burn - you take a deficit and eat that each day.
    That's the weekly average TDEE method.

    With that plan, which is what makes people believe they must exercise to lose weight, you do have to do your plan to lose the planned amount.

    Sadly that table from a 1919 study ( @PAV8888 gave the details) only takes into account exercise - no differences in daily life.

    So your desk jockey and mailman with equal physical stats each doing 5 hrs of exercise weekly would be given the same TDEE to work with.
    That's obviously wrong.

    Hence MFP using much more recent studies for it's activity factors that only apply to daily life without exercise.
    Then exercise is added in when actually done.
    More reliable for people that may not be great about getting in their planned workouts, and incentive to eat more to do them.

    I'll comment too on MFP activity levels - Sedentary if you are syncing an activity tracker.
    I doubt your days are so wildly different that within a week you can't figure out about how much extra adjustment MFP will correct itself with, and then you can plan the day better to incorporate it.

    For those without trackers - honesty.
    And I've found most that get trackers commenting in the forums, before being inspired to move more - discover they were getting adjustments above sedentary already.
    Even desk jobs - but if they had kids (especially the moms, let's be honest here for majority), they bumped on up to Lightly Active without an issues, even more so when the weekend is included.
  • SCoil123
    SCoil123 Posts: 2,111 Member
    I'm set to sedentary with Fitbit synced and negative adjustments activated. That works for me. My activity level varies a lot. Some days I earn 200 cals and others I earn closer to 1400 (typically boxing class and dog walk combo day).
  • mrstrod1
    mrstrod1 Posts: 17 Member
    Ok, so that makes a lot more sense to me. I was thinking that the calories MFP gave me each day were my calories to eat and that if I wanted to get a deficit, I had to leave some on the table. Then, I was adding exercise as extra deficit. I hadn't realized that a deficit was already figured in the MFP daily calories!

    I do let my fitbit log all of my exercise, but I have noticed that it doesn't seem to always recognize my crossfit activities that are not areobic.
    For instance Monday it only gave me credit for a 17 minute workout and a 11 minute workout (it labels these workouts as elliptical - but I was doing all sorts of things like burpees and 500m uphill runs).
    But in between those two - I actually did do about 30 minutes of back squats and shoulder presses. I know that weight training does not earn many calories but fitbit gives me none. That's another reason why I feel "lighty active" is more accurate since I weight train between 4 & 6 days a week.

    As far as keeping up this activity, I really love crossfit so I do see myself doing this long term but I anticipate dropping to only 4 days a week instead of 5 or 6 once I get closer to my goal weight. I started this journey because I was diagnosed with a breastt cancer that has a very high recurrence rate and weight is a big factor. So, I have been trying to set my goals for long term, not just fast weight loss - that's why I actually was trying to slow my loss a little so that I could be sure I wasn't losing any costly lean tissue. But now that I know, I have more calories to eat, I will probably be more successful at slowing my loss rate. And you know what, a small scoop of ice cream now and again sounds nice!
  • SusanMFindlay
    SusanMFindlay Posts: 1,804 Member
    mrstrod1 wrote: »
    I do let my fitbit log all of my exercise, but I have noticed that it doesn't seem to always recognize my crossfit activities that are not areobic.
    For instance Monday it only gave me credit for a 17 minute workout and a 11 minute workout (it labels these workouts as elliptical - but I was doing all sorts of things like burpees and 500m uphill runs).
    But in between those two - I actually did do about 30 minutes of back squats and shoulder presses. I know that weight training does not earn many calories but fitbit gives me none. That's another reason why I feel "lightly active" is more accurate since I weight train between 4 & 6 days a week.

    Does your FitBit have a heartrate monitor? If not, it's just a pedometer so all it can recognize are step-based activities. If it does have a heartrate monitor, you may be getting credited for calories burned (due to elevated heartrate) despite the fact that it's not showing that as an official "activity". If you really want it to show up as an "activity", you can use the side button on your FitBit to tell it "activity starts now!" and tell it what you're doing. You then have to remember to tell it when you're finished, of course. :smile:

    For example, yesterday I got 32,049 steps and burned 3,359 calories. (This was not a typical day.) FitBit recorded 10 separate "activities" - 9 "walk" and 1 "sport". Those activities account for 23,553 steps, but I still got credit for the other 8,496 steps and the calories that they burned. They just happened in small enough bursts that they never turned into a full activity (and two of the walks plus the "sport" should all have been just one walk; not sure what happened there).
    mrstrod1 wrote: »
    But now that I know, I have more calories to eat, I will probably be more successful at slowing my loss rate. And you know what, a small scoop of ice cream now and again sounds nice!

    It is indeed! Good plan!

  • lemurcat12
    lemurcat12 Posts: 30,886 Member
    edited June 2017
    mrstrod1 wrote: »
    Ok, so I have read this whole thread and I am still confused. I still don't understand the "eating" back your exercise thing. If you are trying to have a deficit, how else would you get it? Seriously I'm not being a smart-alec, I just don't get how I'm supposed to use the numbers MFP gives me.

    This might help. (Edit: Oh, hahah, I missed that there was a page 2. This all may be moot! But maybe it will be useful to someone.)

    Before MFP I decided to figure out my calorie goal. At the time I wanted to lose 2 lb/week, and estimated my maintenance calories (based on what I was then eating) at around 2200 calories, even though I was (to my mind) sedentary, in that I did no exercise. I decided it made sense to cut calories by 500 and add exercise up to about 500 cal/day, which would have given me a calorie goal of 1700, and I would not eat back calories from exercise.

    With MFP, I went through the program and said sedentary (based on what it described for sedentary) and explained I intended to exercise and so on and got 1200 calories. Ugh! So I changed my exercise and did it again, same, and then I finally realized that it wasn't including the exercise. So to lose 2 lb/week while sedentary, I would have to eat 1200. If I wanted to do what I thought was good before (lose 1 lb through exercise and 1 lb by cutting calories), I would log back the exercise I did (the 500 per day, on average) and then end up with -- tah dah! -- the 1700 that the other method gave me.

    Cutting calories to the level I should eat if NOT exercising and then proceeding to exercise on top of that would not be healthy. And as you can see, adding back exercise does not interfere with having a deficit or weight loss -- does that make sense?

    Also, one thing I realized after doing it for a bit -- I was not sedentary, I was lightly active even without exercise, as I walk a decent amount. I changed my activity level, but you can handle this with a Fitbit if you have one, or some other activity tracker.
    This was yesterday (typical day for exercise cals is between 400 & 700)
    Goal 1660 - food 1574 + exercise 674 = 760 remaining (so am I not really supposed to have the 760 remaining? was I supposed to eat those too?

    YES, you do eat these too.

    The reason many people say eat 50% or 75% of them, to start, however, is because if you do not have an activity tracker that is reliable and if you are doing exercises like Crossfit which are extremely hard to measure accurately MFP often overestimates them. In particular, I think it overestimates "circuit training" or similar classes, at least for people who are still pretty out of shape, things like zumba classes or dancing, and the elliptical and spinning. Also people sometimes use outdoor biking entries for stationary biking and those are wrong and overcount. The big commonality in most of these is that how hard you feel like you are working doesn't necessarily tell you what the calorie burn was, and people who are out of shape think they are working really hard (and genuinely are) when doing less actual activity. The running entries are more reliable, because you base it on actual time and speed (so ultimately distance). (Running gets off if you run for longer, as it doesn't subtract out calories that would be burned anyway.)

    Big point is pick a method to start with and then go by results. Are you losing what you intended to over a month? Great? More or less? Consider adjusting.
  • lemurcat12
    lemurcat12 Posts: 30,886 Member
    SusanMFindlay wrote: »
    It's also worth noting that if you have a lot of calories left at the end of the day because you were more active than usual, there's no rule that says you have to eat them on that same day. If you're not hungry and would prefer to save them for the next day (when you might be hungrier) or a special event a couple of days later, your body will not care. It will only care if you consistently undereat.

    This too, and this is why I tend to use TDEE method (that averages workout calories over the week).
  • Geocitiesuser
    Geocitiesuser Posts: 1,429 Member
    I have mine set to sedentary for max weight loss (1.5lb per week). I only eat part of my exercise calories, and most likely underestimate my calorie burn.

    Do not do what I'm doing. I'm trying to correct my behavior because I'm eating far too few calories. I know my problem is that initial goal of 1500 calories has me thinking that 1500 is the magic number when in reality it is just way too low. All of the aspects of weight loss I've struggled with in the past month or two are a direct result of method 1 as described in the original post.

    Baby steps, baby steps, baby steps.
  • heybales
    heybales Posts: 18,842 Member
    WW merely doing what the people want - best potential for fast weight loss.
    Never mind what the weight actually is and how it affects maintaining.
    Must meet scale goal!

    And after you lose to goal weight, and then blow up in maintenance (figuratively and literally) - they got you hooked because you were successful once, and most programs like that squarely try to lay the blame on the person (which is many time true anyway), so they will come back and try harder next time.

  • Christine_72
    Christine_72 Posts: 16,049 Member
    Yep, i think WW relies on repeat business.
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