Can I keep calories burned from being added to food allowance?

CMBHAM

If I eat the amount amount I burned, I'm not going to lose weight. If I have a paid membership, is it an option to not have them added to how much I can eat?

goal06082021

That's how MFP is designed to work, is for you to eat back your exercise calories. When you go through the guided setup and tell MFP the rate you want to lose (x lb/kg per week), it gives you a calorie budget that is how much you should eat BEFORE counting deliberate exercise. When you do deliberately burn more calories through exercise, you are supposed to eat those back to maintain the same deficit so that you lose at the expected rate. Below is a longer explanation that I've spoiled if you aren't interested in math.

Suppose your maintenance calories is 2000 per day on days you don't do any purposeful exercise. If you want to lose 1lb per week, you'll need to eat 500 fewer calories per day than your body needs to go about its business to create a deficit of 3500 calories for the week below your maintenance (1lb of fat contains about 3500 calories, 3500 / 7 = 500). That's 1500 calories per day.

Suppose you eat your 1500 calories, then go for a long walk and burn, oh, 250 or so. If you don't eat those 250 calories back, then your deficit is now 750 calories for the day, not 500 - you'll lose faster than intended. Which sounds like it wouldn't be a bad thing, but losing weight too quickly can actually cause problems, not the least of which is that your body will start pulling the calories it needs to sustain your life from tissues other than fat (i.e., muscle). If you do eat those 250 calories back, you are still in a deficit and will still lose at the rate you expect. In fact, you could even go over your 1500-calorie budget a little, even on days when you don't exercise - as long as it's not by more than whatever your deficit is (in this case 500/day), you will still actually lose, just more slowly than you were intending. If you ate an extra 250 calories on a day when you didn't exercise, your deficit for the day is just 250 instead of the expected 500, but that's still fewer calories than your body needs to go about its daily business.

With all that said, many users (myself included) have a consistent enough exercise habit that we prefer to use a third-party TDEE calculator and use that to figure a calorie budget rather than using the guided setup here. TDEE takes purposeful exercise into account, where MFP doesn't; by figuring your budget from your TDEE, you're automagically accounting for and eating back your exercise calories without having to log them separately.

I2k4

Fairly new, I deal with the automation by setting Goals Activity Level to Not Very Active, so it's not bumping target calorie or macros based on "expected" rather than actual performed exercise burn. In Cardio have Created some custom exercises for Diary entry based on external source estimates for what I do. (At the moment, only doing full body isometric routines for some joint recovery instead of active resistance training or cardio, the actual calorie burn is minimal and I just diarize the historical fact of workouts in Exercise Notes, without claiming any burn for extra nutrition at all.)

westrich20940

I do not know how it works or if that is an option in the paid version but:

This all depends on how you initially figured out your calorie goal on this website/app. Did you use MFP's guided set up to do it? If so --- then you will lose weight even eating back your exercise calories. It adds them back because that is how it's designed. The calorie goal that it gives you (assuming you chose that you wanted to lose weight) is already set at a deficit from your maintenance calories. So....if you then workout on top of that, then it will likely bring your NET calories down to below a healthy range.

If you used some other method to figure your daily calorie goal and manually put it in MFP, then whether you eat back your exercise calories or not will depend on how you've figured your daily calorie goal.

CMBHAM

Thanks all. I will try saying I'm not very active. I'm doing Tai chi at least 4 times a week and it is giving me a huge amount of calories burned for it which is not at all realistic. Right at this moment, I'm not doing much more than that other than walking and a little gardening.

westrich20940

OK...so what did you choose at your 'activity' level in MFP when you set up your calorie goal?

If you are fairly inactive in your regular life (with the exception of your Tai Chi workouts) then I'd assume you chose 'sedentary'. MFP would still have set your calorie goal at a deficit already if you choose that you wanted to lose weight.

And as far as how many calories you are burning during Tai Chi....if you are using the databased to choose that exercise, it's totally possible that the calorie burn estimate is not correct. I have found that some things are accurate and some are wildly inaccurate. So I usually try to use multiple sources for an estimate of the calorie burn. Like I'd Google a few calculators or charts that list how many calorie are typically burned doing Tai Chi and choose some number in the middle of what you end up finding (you can manually change the calories burned in MFP). I typically run....and I used to use the estimate my running app gave me, the estimate my HRM gave me, and Googled some estimates and chose a calorie burn that was a median of what I found. It seemed to work pretty well.

ninerbuff

Whatever activity level you input, MFP accounts for it and sets your intake goal. Math is what is important here. If you are eating 1200 calories a day AND then add exercise (say 300 calories burned), then your NET calories are only 900 calories for the day. NOT GOOD. If you ate back the 300 calories, your NET is still 1200.

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KickassAmazon76

CMBHAM wrote: »

Thanks all. I will try saying I'm not very active. I'm doing Tai chi at least 4 times a week and it is giving me a huge amount of calories burned for it which is not at all realistic. Right at this moment, I'm not doing much more than that other than walking and a little gardening.

How is MFP getting those calories burned?

Are they from a fitness tracker, or are you manually entering them in?