Using only excercise to create deficit

Kittyy1994

Hi all, has anyone tried using exercise only to create their deficit - I am far too hungry on a calorie deficit so I was thinking about eating at maintenance then not logging excerise and see how it goes. I do some form of exercise every day. Has anyone tried this?

BarbaraHelen2013

In theory, it should work as long as you’re confident of your maintenance level. In the same way as a calorie is a calorie - a deficit is a deficit!

asellitti6523

If you are hungry on a calorie deficit your first thought shouldn't be to abandon the strategy and try to eat at maintenance and hope that you can create a deficit through exercise. I would first look at the food your are eating and consider adjusting your diet and trying to find more satiating foods to incorporate into your diet. A quick google search will show you lists of foods that help you feel more full. A big mistake many people looking to lose weight do is try to severely cut down calories from each and every meal. A meal that is slightly higher in calories but keeps you feeling full and satisfied for longer is better than a meal with less calories but makes you feel hungry after 1-2 hours of eating it. You are then more likely to succumb to cravings and end up eating more calories than if you just had the more filling meal to begin with.

As you are likely aware you need to burn 3500 calories to lose just 1lb of body fat. If you exercise everyday and burn at least 500 calories each day and eat at maintenance you can lose weight but the process will be substantially slower than eating at a deficit and supplementing that deficit with calories burned through exercise. However, tracking how many calories you burn through exercise has a lot of variables and most people overestimate how many calories they actually burn. The smart watches and/or sensors on aerobic machines are only so accurate. Measuring calories in food is far more accurate if done correctly.

In closing I would say if your goal is only to lose 5-10 lbs and you don't really have a timetable of when you would want to lose it by your approach is doable but less than ideal. For someone who is 25+lbs overweight I would never recommend that strategy because results are going to take too long and discouragement is going to set in making it far more likely for that person to give up hope and go back to their old habits which got them overweight in the first place.

NorthCascades

Sure, lots of people do. Everyone who hikes the PCT probably loses 30 pounds on average, and those people eat as much calorie dense food as possible. They also walk 25 miles every day.

But that's probably not in your plans for 2020. And the question isn't if other people can, it's whether you will. That's just a math problem. How many calories a day do you like to eat? What's your current TDEE? Subtract one from the other, that's how many calories you need to burn with exercise to do it.

In general, if you really love exercise, you might pull it off. If not, you'll probably find it to be more of a burden than changing your eating habits. (Example, taco dinner = 3 hours on the bike, "sensible" dinner = 1 hour.)

You said you're too hungry on a calorie deficit. Maybe another answer is to change your diet, instead of eating less food, you might be able to find things that make you feel more satiated and full. And keep exercising.

Kittyy1994

Thanks for the replies. My weight loss target is not very aggressive at all, just the last 2-3 kilos (some say vanity weight) only. When eating in deficit I always hit protein goals but still feel hungry and lack energy at the gym.

sarabushby

If you go down this path be aware that the extra exercise may well make you more hungry - your appetite will likely increase, so then you may well be back to square 1 and feeling hungry if you haven’t addressed other factors like what you eat and when to make you more satiated.
Also be wary of taking the calorie burn values directly from a sports watch or exercise equipment in the gym. The former may be inaccurate for strength training & interval sessions whilst the latter notoriously exaggerate your burn.

Personally I do use your suggested approach most days, I tend to eat at maintenance or higher, but burn 260-800 extra calories through activity or purposeful exercise and that becomes my deficit but I train for Triathlon and am used to training 6 days a week, mostly fairly high intensity or long duration and sometimes more than one activity a day. Unless you have a reasonable degree of fitness you may well burn out or struggle to do enough exercise to burn the calories at the rate you need to for your desired weight loss.

sijomial

It's what a lot of non-calorie counters do to lose weight - try to maintain their normal food intake while being deliberately more active and doing more exercise.

In calorie counting terms it removes the uncertainty around exercise calories so if your food logging and non-exercise day maintenance setting is good enough you will create a deficit but likely a variable one (that's not a bad thing as some people create a lot of unnecessary stress by trying to achieve a linear weight loss).

Different types of exercise can create very different hunger responses. High intensity cardio or strength training have a far bigger hunger impact for me compared to moderate intensity cardio even if that is long duration with far higher calorie burns.

mmapags

Kittyy1994 wrote: »

Thanks for the replies. My weight loss target is not very aggressive at all, just the last 2-3 kilos (some say vanity weight) only. When eating in deficit I always hit protein goals but still feel hungry and lack energy at the gym.

If you are only looking to lose a few kilos, that strategy can work. A question I would have is; when you eat in a deficit, how much of a deficit is it? And if you eat back some portion of your exercise calories, don't you arrive at about the same calories for the day doing that?

amusedmonkey

Yes, that's perfectly fine. Bear in mind that some people experience an increase in appetite when they increase their activity level, so your best bet is to keep logging to make sure you aren't inadvertently overeating.

sijomial wrote: »

Different types of exercise can create very different hunger responses. High intensity cardio or strength training have a far bigger hunger impact for me compared to moderate intensity cardio even if that is long duration with far higher calorie burns.

This has been my experience as well. It affected me to the point where I try to keep my strength training sessions very focused on my goals to keep them short, and I abandoned high intensity cardio all together because it makes me hungry enough to eat all the calories I burned and then some, making maintenance much harder.

lemurcat2

Kittyy1994 wrote: »

Thanks for the replies. My weight loss target is not very aggressive at all, just the last 2-3 kilos (some say vanity weight) only. When eating in deficit I always hit protein goals but still feel hungry and lack energy at the gym.

Yeah, that should work.

I think the exercise-only thing gets a bad rap because some not counting just think if they increase exercise they should lose, even if their diet is not in check (I did that a bunch in the past).

But I also used increasing exercise (training for a tri) as a way to get off my last 10 vanity lbs once upon a time. I had my eating in check and was able to tell I wasn't eating more than I had been (when I'd been at maintenance for a time), and lost the rest due to the increased exercise.

cwolfman13

Kittyy1994 wrote: »

Hi all, has anyone tried using exercise only to create their deficit - I am far too hungry on a calorie deficit so I was thinking about eating at maintenance then not logging excerise and see how it goes. I do some form of exercise every day. Has anyone tried this?

Just FYI, If you're using exercise to create your deficit, you're still on a calorie deficit. There is no difference between eating at a 500 calorie deficit and eating non exercise maintenance and exercising 500 calories off.

That said, that's pretty much what I do when I'm cutting my winter fluff in the spring...it's pretty slow though because it is difficult to create a larger deficit with exercise vs just cutting out some food. I spin 3x per week or get out on my road or mountain bike depending on weather and time and lift a couple days per week and have a couple of rest days so my rate of loss ends up being around .5 Lbs per week which can be difficult to see on the scale...I don't really see much except for every 4-6 weeks because the fat loss is masked by daily fluctuations.

cwolfman13

mmapags wrote: »

Kittyy1994 wrote: »

Thanks for the replies. My weight loss target is not very aggressive at all, just the last 2-3 kilos (some say vanity weight) only. When eating in deficit I always hit protein goals but still feel hungry and lack energy at the gym.

If you are only looking to lose a few kilos, that strategy can work. A question I would have is; when you eat in a deficit, how much of a deficit is it? And if you eat back some portion of your exercise calories, don't you arrive at about the same calories for the day doing that?

Yeah, this is what I was trying to get at too...it's really 6 of 1, half dozen of the other and really semantics more than anything. If I'm losing .5 Lbs per week I have a 250 calorie deficit which means that even though I'm namely using exercise rather than changing my eating, I'm still eating in a 250 calorie deficit.

motivatedmartha

How would you know you were in deficit if you weren't monitoring the number of calories you were eating?

mmapags

cwolfman13 wrote: »

mmapags wrote: »

Kittyy1994 wrote: »

Thanks for the replies. My weight loss target is not very aggressive at all, just the last 2-3 kilos (some say vanity weight) only. When eating in deficit I always hit protein goals but still feel hungry and lack energy at the gym.

If you are only looking to lose a few kilos, that strategy can work. A question I would have is; when you eat in a deficit, how much of a deficit is it? And if you eat back some portion of your exercise calories, don't you arrive at about the same calories for the day doing that?

Yeah, this is what I was trying to get at too...it's really 6 of 1, half dozen of the other and really semantics more than anything. If I'm losing .5 Lbs per week I have a 250 calorie deficit which means that even though I'm namely using exercise rather than changing my eating, I'm still eating in a 250 calorie deficit.

Yes. And that's why I asked the question of how large a deficit is getting applied. Some have a tendency to be too aggressive with only a small amount to lose. That could cause hunger issues.

sijomial

motivatedmartha wrote: »

How would you know you were in deficit if you weren't monitoring the number of calories you were eating?

Weight loss over an extended period of time - just the same as people who count.
I haven't logged my food intake in ages but can decide when to be in a deficit and lose weight successfully.

rheddmobile

The only way to lose weight is to be in a calorie deficit, in other words taking in less than you expend. However CICO has two halves, calories in and calories out, and you can change either one to get the results you want.

If what you mean to say is that restricting calories from your normal eating habits doesn’t work for you and you are wondering whether increasing activity will, then yes, absolutely, that can work - up to a point. There comes a point where a person of average fitness with an average amount of hours in the day can’t reasonably burn any more calories. But you can earn several hundred more calories a day.

Just be aware that several hundred calories can vanish in a heartbeat if you eat a typical American diet. That’s a single dessert, big slice of pizza, half a low calorie meal at an American chain restaurant. You will probably need to count and stay within a reasonable calorie goal in order for this to work for you if you have a habit of overeating.

Luke_rabbit

Kittyy1994 wrote: »

Hi all, has anyone tried using exercise only to create their deficit - I am far too hungry on a calorie deficit so I was thinking about eating at maintenance then not logging excerise and see how it goes. I do some form of exercise every day. Has anyone tried this?

As part of transitioning to maintenance, I changed my goal to maintenance and am still doing a slight deficit, which one could say is from exercise calories. I have a Fitbit linked to MFP and continue to log food, so I am still watching the whole picture. In January my deficit was around 200 calories per day. In February, I am shooting for under 150. My January weight loss was higher than expected. February is going better so far.

I find it a good way to zero in on my actual maintenance calories and get off the last few pounds. However, without tracking exercise, you won't get the benefit of figuring out your maintenance calories.

I didn't increase exercise from what I was doing before, but reading your OP, I don't see you saying that you plan to either.

AnnPT77

One of the things that's weird about MFP, I think, is that it encourages us to think about calories being assigned firmly to categories, as if exercise calories are different.

They aren't. Calories burned rowing and calories burned sleeping are all just calories out.

In MFP, we just just do the accounting for exercise calories differently (which has some benefits). They're still just part of one big heap'o'calories out, to the body.

Similarly, a deficit is a deficit, no matter how accomplished.

When the body goes to fetch some stored body fat to burn to make up for a deficit, it can't tell which calories made up that exact bit of deficit.

Too big a deficit, by any means, is bad. Intake too far out of line with needs will cause problems (doesn't matter if it's exercise, healing, stress or something else making us need more calories or be extra hungry). To small a deficit will result in very slow loss, no matter whether the "too small" deficit results from extra eating, less exercise, or poor tracking. Body doesn't care.

The only meaningful caveat I can think of is that nutrition is important, so in that sense a big deficit from exercise might be slightly healthier than a big deficit from reduced intake: You could get your essential nutrients.

I agree that different strategies can yield different results for different people. Some things make some people hungrier, but not other people; exercise involves more time but has muscle-preservation and health benefits; and that sort of thing. Those strategy experiences are worth talking about.

But no matter where a (say) 250-calorie deficit comes from, they're still calories, and it's still a deficit. Of course you can create a deficit via exercise alone, at constant intake.

(Believing otherwise seems like another side of the weirdness we sometimes see over in the maintenance forum, from people at goal stressing over whether they should now eat back exercise calories. They're not meaningfully different from tooth-brushing calories. It's just that we're used to keeping the books differently.)

Kittyy1994

motivatedmartha wrote: »

How would you know you were in deficit if you weren't monitoring the number of calories you were eating?

I am...

gothchiq

It should still work. Just make sure your logging is as accurate as possible.

ryanaamos

If you are far too hungry, I would try in cutting any empty calories or carbs, to make sure it's hunger and not cravings you are feeling.