How many exercise calories to eat

Krista1084

I’ve been doing MFP for awhile now and have so far lost 45 lbs! I’ve been frequently updating my calorie count as I’ve lost weight. This most recent time it has lowered my calories to 1210/day. I have also been exercising using the 8fit app since the beginning. I was leaving some exercise calories behind because I wasn’t sure how accurate the calorie counts on that app were. The problem I’m now running into is that since my base calories are so low I don’t want to leave too many calories behind and end up consuming less than the lowest 1200 per day. Do I now just eat ALL of my exercise calories or risk being under the lowest recommended intake? Has anyone else run into this dilemma?

heybales

Depends on how you are using the site.
Did you select Sedentary activity level, but you actually have kids, pets, household duties?
Then already missing out on calories.

When you have less fat to loose - it's also safer to have the rate of loss slow down.

That would mean since your base calories are dropping because of moving less weight around daily, your exercise is burning less too unless you are increasing the intensity - depends on if your workouts allow that.

You should change the loss rate to lower than it was. Smaller deficit.
And were you losing at the selected rate or more?

That will tell if you were under-eating already for your goals, which could have been too aggressive already.
And if your exercise calories were good estimate or poor.

Aggressive weight loss is almost always invariably including muscle mass loss - a real bummer since that is very very difficult to build back up, and it's usually muscle that makes you appear slimmer than merely a weight number would indicate.
Lack of muscle when fat is lost results in only more fat being visible - "skinny fat".

If you have this much left to healthy weight, this would be reasonable (if healthy unstressed body otherwise) rate.
15 lbs left - 250 deficit, 1/2 lb weekly
15 - 30 - 500, 1 lb
30 - 50 - 750, 1.5 lb
over 50 - 1000, 2 lb weekly

Oh - that 1200 is recommended minimum for average sedentary woman merely to get enough nutrition to support that lifestyle.
Are you sedentary?
Are you wanting to be average?

Working out would indicate no to both of those - so don't do the minimum for safety - do the best for performance and body changes, and lifestyle changes so you don't become like the majority of dieters that either fail to reach healthy weight, or fail to maintain it, and then repeat again next year, year after year.