Exercise Calories

bozlady911

Does anyone eat the exercise calories or do you stick to the basic daily calorie allowance?

BarbaraHelen2013

MFP is designed so it expects you to log any intentional exercise and eat the calories generated by that exercise.

Not doing so leaves you in a position of having a much larger calorie deficit than you intend for your stated weight loss goal.

There’s an issue with exercise calories often being overestimated by trackers and equipment so it’s common for many to eat only a percentage of the earned calories. You could start with 50% of them and adjust as you monitor your results over time.

sijomial

How will you manage to maintain at goal weight if you don't account for your exercise?

Yes I eat all my exercise calories both when losing and when maintaining weight. But I also put a bit of effort into making sure my estimates are reasonable.

spiriteagle99

I eat back every calorie I can. I mostly walk and run, so the calories are easy to compute. For activities that are less easy to figure out since they depend on effort, like yoga or calisthetics, I'll enter a shorter time, i.e. 20 minutes instead of 30.

AnnPT77

I ate them - after estimating them carefully - all the way through weight loss, and for 4+ years of maintenance since, so far.

If you let MFP set your calorie goal, and if you correctly set the activity level in your profile to reflect your job and daily life without intentional exercise, that's how MFP intends it to be done.

Losing faster isn't necessarily better.

If you want to eat the same number of calories every day, whether you exercise or not, use a TDEE calculator to estimate your calories, because it will average in your planned exercise (the catch is that you must then actually do that exercise, because it's included). You can manually input your calorie goal into MFP in that situation.

Either way, stick with it for 4-6 weeks, then adjust based on your actual average weekly weight loss results (throw out the first couple of weeks if they're unusual/extreme, either high or low, which can sometimes happen). If you're a pre-menopausal woman, stick with it long enough to compare the same point in two or more different menstrual cycles, because cycle-related water retention can be misleading, temporarily.

Best wishes!

janejellyroll

Yes, I use MFP as designed.