Fitnesspal calorie calculation

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FitnessFreak1821
FitnessFreak1821 Posts: 242 Member
edited December 2021 in Fitness and Exercise
OK so I set my calorie limit to 1700. It's Friday so I ate over it but i went for a walk and did a 40 minute work out to make up for it today. I normally just leave it and have a cheat day just as long as i don't go way over my maintenance cals. Today though I felt like I wanted to get excercise in twice(I spaced it out)
Today's diary says 1700-2132 + 522=90

If I'm correct with calories burned my body is now running on 1610 calories like I had only eaten that since it says I have 90 cals available left to eat. Am I correct?

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  • cmriverside
    cmriverside Posts: 34,035 Member
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    You are correct. The app adds calories for intentional exercise.

    1700-2132 is what you ate (so, you ate 432 more calories than your goal)
    522 is the number given for your exercise
    You left 90 calories "uneaten"
    Your Net calories eaten was 1610.
  • springlering62
    springlering62 Posts: 7,666 Member
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    Also known as the Lightbulb Moment when you realize exercise buys you more food.
  • springlering62
    springlering62 Posts: 7,666 Member
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    “You can’t out-exercise a bad diet”, but you can sure piggyback onto a good one!
  • heybales
    heybales Posts: 18,842 Member
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    I'll add that is on-paper math and that is what happened with these estimated figures.

    Your exercise burned some of the food calories (some fat/carbs already stored actually) right off the top, leaving less for the base functions.

    But if using exercise entries from the database, those may or may not be good estimates depending on the workout.
    Walking is actually pretty accurate.

    But - while you could say burn 400 in a walk, that's not over and above what MFP was expecting you to burn already during that chunk of time - which could have been say 100 calories anyway.
    So correctly logged would be only an extra 300.

    This effect is worse with long duration low calorie burn exercise. It's where the advice started to log exercise as 1/2 the suggested - which is not always correct if it's short and intense.

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