Eating exercise calories

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Mandy72CM
Mandy72CM Posts: 59 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
I’ve always struggled with this and felt guilty, lost and confused about calories. I’ve gave up, started again and continued on this cycle for far too long. For the first time I’m going to put all my exercise calories in my diary and eat them if I want to and wait and see what happens.

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  • gjw5000
    gjw5000 Posts: 86 Member
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    Mandy72CM wrote: »
    I’ve always struggled with this and felt guilty, lost and confused about calories. I’ve gave up, started again and continued on this cycle for far too long. For the first time I’m going to put all my exercise calories in my diary and eat them if I want to and wait and see what happens.

    That's what I do! The app gives you your daily amouth, so I eat it and have lost over 20lbs in 2.5 months. I eat what ever I like, but keep within my calories. Good luck!
  • Mandy72CM
    Mandy72CM Posts: 59 Member
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    Thankyou ❤️
  • Shortgirlrunning
    Shortgirlrunning Posts: 1,020 Member
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    MFP is set up for you to eat your exercise calories. There’s no reason to feel guilty about it.

    Exercise is not a way to punish your body. It’s a way to take care of your body and make you stronger. In order to do that you have to fuel the extra movement with more food.

    I always eat back my exercise calories and I’m down 50 lbs.
  • NovusDies
    NovusDies Posts: 8,940 Member
    edited May 2020
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    There is no reason to feel guilty. It is absolutely what you should do as long as you have not included the exercise in your activity settings when you went through the guided set-up.

    If you do not eat them you run the risk of feeling rundown in the short term and in the long term suffer health consequences.

    Last week I took off work to do work around the house. Even though I was eating all my exercise calories I did not properly account for the amount of energy that I was burning that was not being capture by my fitness watch. As a result I crashed and it has taken days for me to feel good again. I am kicking myself for making an obvious mistake. When you are moving around doing exercise, chores, or whatever you are burning energy. That energy needs to mostly come from food and a small portion of it needs to come from stored energy while you are trying to lose weight. If you try to pull too much from stored it leads to bad places.
  • Lillymoo01
    Lillymoo01 Posts: 2,865 Member
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    I am another that ate back my exercise calories. Many start only eating back 50-75% at first but this is mainly to compensate logging inaccuracies. It is not uncommon to overestimate calorie burn and underestimate calories in.

    If your deficit is too large you are more likely to give up because it becomes too hard to maintain and the increased hunger can easily lead to binges and the binge/restrict cycle of dieting prevails.
  • Duck_Puddle
    Duck_Puddle Posts: 3,224 Member
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    Good news is that you SHOULD be adding your exercise calories and eating them (or at least a portion of them). I have eaten every delicious one of mine (for 8 1/2 years).

    I have a pretty low calorie allowance (I’m short, not young and work a desk job at home-I am about as sedentary as you can be). If I didn’t eat my exercise calories, I would gnaw off my arm by the end of a week.

    As an aside-guilt should be reserved for sins or moral failings. Unless you took food away from a hungry person, you haven’t committed a sin or had a moral failing even if you ate 12,000 calories. You may have eaten more calories than you needed-but that’s all that happened. Guilt and shame add an awful spiral to this process and they don’t belong because it’s just food. It’s also a very difficult thought pattern to break.

    Anyway-log your exercise and eat up!

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