How many exercise calories should I eat back?

n_green_l

Hello, I aim for 10k steps a day, and I'm participating in a 28 day challenge tomorrow which is a mix of hiit/lower body strength/upper body strength 5 days a week. I'm 11stone 9lb and 5"7 so 6lb overweight according to BMI and want to lose 11lb.
Mfp has set me as 1200 calories a day, I use a fitbit to track exercise calories. What's the best amount of exercise calories to eat back? I'm struggling to lose weight so don't want to overeat but at same time I get hungry easily so want to remain consistent..

kshama2001

n_green_l wrote: »

Hello, I aim for 10k steps a day, and I'm participating in a 28 day challenge tomorrow which is a mix of hiit/lower body strength/upper body strength 5 days a week. I'm 11stone 9lb and 5"7 so 6lb overweight according to BMI and want to lose 11lb.

Mfp has set me as 1200 calories a day, I use a fitbit to track exercise calories. What's the best amount of exercise calories to eat back? I'm struggling to lose weight so don't want to overeat but at same time I get hungry easily so want to remain consistent..

You are easily hungry because you made the common mistake of choosing a weekly weight loss goal that is too aggressive. With only 11 pounds to lose, change your weekly weight loss goal to a half pound a week and enjoy the extra calories.



I find the MFP exercise calories slightly inflated for me and eat about 75% of them back. When I had a FitBit One I did not find them inflated and ate 100% of them back.

Some people eat 50% of their exercise calories; others more than 100%. If you want to be conservative, you can start with 50% and reevaluate after AT LEAST A MONTH.

callsitlikeiseeit

as stated, your deficit is too large for the very little amount of weight you want to lose.

i eat more than that and have far more to lose.

as far as eating back exercise calories goes, start with eating back HALF of them. Then adjust up or down, depending on the rate of loss. (more if you are losing too fast, less if you are losing less than the suggested rate of loss per your calorie goals)

sijomial

The idea is to eat back all your actual exercise calories and not use them to boost weight loss over what appears to be an already aggressive deficit.
Cutting them in half only makes sense if you have a suspicion they are double reality. The idea of calorie counting is to try to make reasonably accurate estimates of both calories in and out and not apply random guesses.

Remember MFP didn't tell you to eat 1200 calories (+exercise calories) - the choices you made in your goal setup have resulted in hitting the minimum calorie allowance. Suggest you revisit your goals to make things more appropriate to what is only a small amount of weight to lose.

lgfrie

Agreeing with the above posts, I think the "eat half of your exercise calories" thing is really more for people at small to moderate calorie deficits who have some wiggle room. You are already at an extremely low calorie intake - I would definitely eat 75 - 100 % of those exercise calories and enjoy every one of them. Otherwise, you risk having net calories under 1,000 which is always a bad idea.

PAV8888

You use Fitbit to count specific exercise Calories or total daily energy expenditure calories?

Fitbit will be more accurate for most for the second.

Your deficit is very aggressive.

I would "math" how closely Fitbit TDEE (daily calories) and your mfp logged totals) correspond to your weight change (for example using trendweigh.com) over time. Think 4-6 week time periods...

You should get a percentage decision (say my Fitbit is 100% accurate given my logging, or 95% accurate or what have you)

And then I would look at that (relatively accurate for you) number and deduct a 15% deficit at most ...

But that's me!

AnnPT77

As most others have said: Eat back all of the accurate exercise calories. If you can't define "accurate", then use "reasonable".

Do that, on top of a sensible base calorie goal for your current size. Unlikely, given what you've said, that 1200 is really sensible. (It was too low for me, at around your weight, at age 59, fewer steps, eating all exercise.)

skinnyrev2b

Just to echo the others (wholeheartedly agree with most) - but just to say... I am on 1280 per day - hitting 12k steps and daily yoga sessions.
I was only eating half my Fitbit given exercise calories and I wasn't losing any weight for about 5 weeks. I upped the ante, ate them ALL, thinking 'surely I can't lose weight on 1900 calories a day (that was yesterday - an outlier - normally I'm eating about 1800cals.)
Yup... nice slippery weight loss slope now. I'm 5ft 4 and (now) got 2.5 stone to lose (now 11st 13lb). Currently losing at an average of 1lb per week. I may have to start eating more shortly as this average is based on the rate I'm losing now against the plateau.
Oh, and I'm 41 and female.
YMMV, but I'd suggest eating your well earned exercise calories!

csplatt

I know that a lot of people get flack for eating 1200 calories, but my TDEE is under 1600 on a sedentary day, so a 250 calorie deficit is between 1200 and 1300 calories for slight weight loss.

To answer your question, I absolutely eat them back but with the assumption that my tracking of calories burned was probably a tad generous / over estimated.

janejellyroll

csplatt wrote: »

I know that a lot of people get flack for eating 1200 calories, but my TDEE is under 1600 on a sedentary day, so a 250 calorie deficit is between 1200 and 1300 calories for slight weight loss.

To answer your question, I absolutely eat them back but with the assumption that my tracking of calories burned was probably a tad generous / over estimated.

If OP is regularly hitting their goal of 10k steps per day, their TDEE won't be that of a sedentary person.