Food Calories / Exercise Calories

AliRown

Hello Everyone,

I have recently started to track my calorie intake for weight loss purposes. I've set my calories per day at 1200. I also track my exercise calories via a fitness watch. In order to lose weight, do I maintain my 1200 calories without incorporating my exercise calories? or am I able to eat the 1200 calories plus my additional exercise calories? I'm looking to lose about 7 pounds and have just started. Thanks!

TinaLeigh67

For me personally, I did not see a drop in the scales until I stopped eating my exercise calories. I'm sure it has worked differently for others, but I just maintained my current weight by eating the exercise calories I had earned. Once I stopped, I started to see the number drop on the scale. I currently have lost 8 pounds over the past 2 months.

janejellyroll

If your 1,200 calorie goal comes from MFP, that's on the assumption you aren't doing any intentional exercise. Since that's the lowest women should generally go, if you're planning on being active it would be a really good idea to account for your exercise calories.

autumnblade75

If you have only 7 lbs to lose, you should probably only be looking to lose 1/2 lb per week - your goal should very likely be higher than 1200, before you add in those exercise calories. (Unless you're VERY short and ALSO Sedentary, like under 5 ft. and nearly bedridden.)

westrich20940

What lead you to choose the 1200 cal/day goal? That's honestly pretty low for most women (not ALL...just most). So if you chose that you wanted to lose 2lbs/week....that's just too aggressive of a goal.

If I were you --- I'd use a TDEE calculator and get some estimates of what you're burning per day generally --- then subtract some cals from that and manually set it as your net calorie goal for the day on MFP. If you include your intentionally exercise/activity into your calculation (you'll have to choose something like 'sedentary', 'lightly active', ect...) then just shoot for eating slightly lower than your TDEE to create the deficit.

If you set yourself to sedentary --- still choose a calorie goal slightly lower than your TDEE, log any cardio you do and IMO you should eat back 50-100% of those calories depending on your progress/how hungry you are.

VegjoyP

langstontl wrote: »

For me personally, I did not see a drop in the scales until I stopped eating my exercise calories. I'm sure it has worked differently for others, but I just maintained my current weight by eating the exercise calories I had earned. Once I stopped, I started to see the number drop on the scale. I currently have lost 8 pounds over the past 2 months.

I am.more in agreement with you except I do go above 1200 most days.. when I was eating less I got too thin... I mean real thin.. now I maintain a bit above base cals, around 1270 to 1300 ish. It varies but I would never eat all MFP sayS I burn, although everyone else seems to disagree.

AnnPT77

VegjoyP wrote: »

langstontl wrote: »

For me personally, I did not see a drop in the scales until I stopped eating my exercise calories. I'm sure it has worked differently for others, but I just maintained my current weight by eating the exercise calories I had earned. Once I stopped, I started to see the number drop on the scale. I currently have lost 8 pounds over the past 2 months.

I am.more in agreement with you except I do go above 1200 most days.. when I was eating less I got too thin... I mean real thin.. now I maintain a bit above base cals, around 1270 to 1300 ish. It varies but I would never eat all MFP sayS I burn, although everyone else seems to disagree.

The basic issue, IMU, is that MFP accounts for exercise differently from some other so-called "calorie calculators" (all of which really *estimate*, not *calculate*). It expects us to log exercise separately, eat that back.

I think this encourages people to believe that when they don't lose/maintain at the expected calorie level, the reason is about exercise calories. I think that's not necessarily so.

When MFP produces a calorie goal based on one's profile set-up, it's just spitting out the average calorie needs for people with similar demographics (age, sex, height, weight, activity level, etc.). Most people are close to average, a few are a bit higher/lower, a very rare few are surprisingly far off (also could be high or low). That's just the nature of statistical estimates. If someone logs carefully at that level for 4-6 weeks (whole menstrual cycles for women who are of relevant age), they can get an insight into whether that estimate is close for them, and if not, in which direction it may be inaccurate. All of that is true even before exercise estimating/logging enters the picture.

The exercise logging kind of muddies the waters, makes people think in terms of eating back exercise or not eating it back, when that may or may not really be where the discrepancy is.

You've found that you need to eat at a calorie level that seems to be your base estimate plus some but not all of your exercise calories, in order to stay at the weight you prefer. I've found something different, which is that if I don't eat back all of them, plus some more (!), on top of MFP's base estimate for me, I'll keep losing weight when I don't want to.

In my case, I'm pretty sure that the issue isn't the correctness/incorrectness of the exercise calories. Based on almost 6 years of logging experience, I'm pretty sure that the base estimate MFP gives me is way too low (by around 500 calories!) . . . not because MFP is doing anything wrong, but because I'm a weirdo who's far from the population average (in the fortunate direction) for some unknown reason. I say that for several reasons, but an easily-understood one is that I've had multi-week periods where I wasn't doing much exercise, and I still needed many more calories to stay at steady weight, compared to MFP's base calorie estimate.

For any given person, if they don't lose/maintain weight at the calories MFP estimates, the main reason could be the base calorie estimate, or exercise calorie estimates (if wildly inaccurate), or in some few cases perhaps even inaccurate food logging. But we tend to think of adjusting in terms of adjusting exercise calories, because of how MFP accounts for those separately. It's really all just one bucket of calories, with various factors influencing whether we lose/maintain as expected at that calorie level.

(For sure, all of us need more calories when exercising, vs. when not exercising. For the average person, exercise is a small percentage of the day's calorie needs. I'm a pretty good exerciser, and it's usually around 10-15% of my daily needs total . . . I'd have to be pretty far off in my exercise estimates to explain a 500 calorie discrepancy between MFP's estimate and my experience-based estimates. Even on a for-me huuuge recent exercise day, around 3.5 hours of exercise, the exercise calories I estimated were only about 1/3 of my daily total.)

IMO, some careful experimenting can give an individual insight into which element(s) are causing a discrepancy between estimated and actual loss rates, but doing that takes time and care. For me, since my exercise varies seasonally, it was worth the effort to try to figure that out, so that I could confidently lose or maintain weight as desired, under varying conditions. (I'm sure it's still not exactly exact, but it's pretty close. I can predict my multi-week results from my calorie logs quite accurately.)

If I were the OP, I'd start by believing the fitness tracker's calorie estimate, and eating the exercise calories after MFP does its adjustment based on synched data. After 4-6 weeks (whole menstrual cycles, comparing weight at the same relative day in two or more cycles!), you would have a really good idea whether your fitness tracker is accurate for you (i.e., whether you're close to average) or not. (My good brand/model fitness tracker - one that's accurate for many other people - estimates crazy-low for me, by about the same amount MFP does. 🤷‍♀️ I guess I'm *consistently* weird, at least. )