tracking exercise

swan57

Does anyone know if you can tract your exercise and have them not add those calories burned back into your daily calories? Also, can you set your own calorie limit for the day?

myfurturelooksgood

I set my own calorie limit for the day in the settings but I don't know how to stop having those exercise calories burned not added back into the daily calories. I just disregard them since I don't care to eat them and stick with the amount I know I am allowed.

callsitlikeiseeit

you can change the amount burned to 1 (cant change it to 0) but you really SHOULD eat back at least a portion of them -that is how MFP is designed. Your deficit is built INTO your calorie allotment. So by not eating some of them back, you put yourself at risk for under eating and malnutrition. Both can have major long term effects on your health.

MFP tends to overestimate the number of calories burned for most activities. Most people start by eating back half of the calories given, watch their weight for a couple of weeks, and adjust up or down, depending on their rate of loss (more if they are losing too fast, less if they are losing slower than anticipated)

rosebarnalice

I just pay attention to my calorie goal and calories consumed, and ignore the net.
In reality, I usually I eat back about half of my calories on a weekly basis-- some days it's 0, some days it's all of them, but it averages about half.

swan57

Thanks everyone - great advice

AnnPT77

Premium MFP will let you do it explicitly - there's a setting for it (see photo below). I have premium, but for me it would be a terrible idea not to eat back my exercise calories. That was true during weight loss, and it's obviously true now in maintenance (if I don't want to keep losing weight, or go through a lot of mumbo jumbo when my exercise volume changes, which it routinely does seasonally).

I do estimate exercise calories quite carefully. As a person who expects to keep counting long term, estimating exercise calories was a skill I needed to develop to manage my weight long term. In year 5+ of maintenance now (after several previous decades of overweight/obesity), I'm now glad I did it that way. I usually exercise a fair amount, but in 5+ years there have been periods when I couldn't (injuries, surgical recovery, etc.), and it's useful to be able to keep my weight where I want it, under those varying conditions.

NorthCascades

Why are you adding them to a calorie tracking site if you don't want the calories? If you stop doing that, it'll stop happening. 🙂 I'm not trying to be sarcastic.