Do I Eat The Calories I Earn From Working Out

RolandeS

For starters I’ve placed myself on 1690 calories a day. I want to loose no less than 0.5 lb a week. To do so, do I eat the calories I’ve burned? It adds calories back to my daily today.

spiriteagle99

Yes. MFP is set up so you should eat back some, if not all, of your exercise calories. If you don't eat back your exercise calories you could end up undereating and thus not getting the nutrition your body needs. Many people say that the exercise calories are exaggerated, so they only eat back half or 3/4 of the amount given. For me, the calories that MFP gives for exercise work well so I eat back all my exercise calories. Pick a percentage (50-100%) and see if you are losing at the rate you expect. If not, adjust.

AnnPT77

What Spiriteagle said, with one quibble.

It sounds like you have a fitness tracker synched to MFP. For most people (people close to average), those give a more personalized estimate of activity calories than does the MFP database. Because of that, I'd suggest that you start by eating back most or all of your exercise calories that come from that synch.

Do that for 4-6 weeks, then check your loss rate against your 0.5lb/week minimum. If you're on target (and not losing dangerously fast for your current size), then keep doing that. If you're losing slower than that target rate, drop calories a bit (how much depends on how far off), and run another month's experiment.

If you're female, adult, and not yet in menopause (as your profile photo leads me to assume), then compare weights at the same relative point in at least two different menstrual cycles. For some women, cycle-related water retention can seriously distort actual average results, if weight is compared at different points in the cycles.

Best wishes!

lynn_glenmont

You say that you placed yourself on 1690 calories a day. Where did you get 1690 from? If you got it from MFP, then yes, MFP intends you to eat more when you exercise. If you got it offsite from a TDEE calculator, that calculator does not intend for you to eat more when you exercise. If you pulled the number from thin air, only the thin air can tell you whether to eat more when you exercise.

hicim705

I wonder about this. I had my FitBit synched with MFP but found that I 'was allowed' to eat way more than I even thought I should because of the calore defecit. Fro what I understand, if you **PAY** (of course) for MFP, the nubers get adjusted between what you should eat/how much you exercised. Of course, without this - it seems that what you burn is added back into what you can eat. Losing weight, no matter how you do it, is really based on calories in/calories out. Am I wrong?

kshama2001

hicim705 wrote: »

I wonder about this. I had my FitBit synched with MFP but found that I 'was allowed' to eat way more than I even thought I should because of the calore defecit. Fro what I understand, if you **PAY** (of course) for MFP, the nubers get adjusted between what you should eat/how much you exercised. Of course, without this - it seems that what you burn is added back into what you can eat. Losing weight, no matter how you do it, is really based on calories in/calories out. Am I wrong?

I've only had the free version of MFP. When I had my fitbit synced, there was an exercise adjustment for calories.

(I lost that fitbit, used a dumb pedometer for a while, and when I got a new fitbit did not bother to sync it because I prefer to log exercise manually.)

Someone will correct me if I am wrong, but I believe if you look at the calories directly on your device, they are higher than you might expect, because they include calories from just being alive, not solely from your exercise. The calorie number that is relevant to MFP is in MFP, not the device.

AnnPT77

hicim705 wrote: »

I wonder about this. I had my FitBit synched with MFP but found that I 'was allowed' to eat way more than I even thought I should because of the calore defecit. Fro what I understand, if you **PAY** (of course) for MFP, the nubers get adjusted between what you should eat/how much you exercised. Of course, without this - it seems that what you burn is added back into what you can eat. Losing weight, no matter how you do it, is really based on calories in/calories out. Am I wrong?

You're right that the basic direct determinant of losing weight is getting calorie intake lower than calorie expenditure, on average over time, by any means. (Other things can have an indirect effect through energy level, fatigue, cravings, etc. - but the direct effect is still via calories in or out.)

IMU, you're wrong, about how free or premium MFP treat the data from a fitness tracker. The basic calculation is done in the same way in either, when you have a tracker synched.

Either way - free or premium - if you are more active (exercise and daily life combined) according to the tracker than your activity level setting in MFP would suggest, additional calories get added to your eating goal, to keep your calorie deficit the same, and give you the same estimated weight loss rate.

If you have negative calorie adjustment enabled in MFP, MFP will also subtract calories if the tracker sees you as being less active than your MFP activity level setting would suggest. If you don't have negative calorie adjustment enabled, MFP won't subtract calories, so there is a risk that you'll overeat. (If the numbers are small, it's no big deal. If they're big, it may be.)

In premium MFP, you do get some options about how MFP will handle exercise calories, that aren't available in free MFP. This includes the ability to tell MFP not to add exercise calories to your eating goal ( . . . a thing that I consider a bad decision, as a generality with a few exception cases).

Most people (people who are "average") will find that MFP and their good brand/model tracker both tend to be pretty close to accurate for them, assuming accurate settings in each. (Inaccurately guessing one's own activity level in MFP is somewhat common, though.)

MFP and the tracker are just doing statistical estimates, giving us the average for people like us as our calorie goal. Most people are close to average (there's a small standard deviation, in statistical terms, or in visual terms the bell curve is tall and narrow). Even so, by definition (because it's a statistical estimate), a fraction of people will be noticeably higher or lower in calorie needs than average. A very rare few will be surprisingly far from average, still potentially in either direction.

The implication is that it will be a good idea to run a multi-week personal experiment: Follow the calculated calorie goal for 4-6 weeks (whole menstrual cycles for women to whom those happen), and average the weekly weight loss. (Throw out the first couple of weeks if they look dramatically unusual, go for another couple weeks.) If actual average results are meaningfully different from targets (and one was compliant with goal, logging carefully), then adjust calorie intake and run another experimental few weeks at that new calorie level.

IMO, the "eat back half of exercise calories" is overgeneralized for all, and probably not a great strategy for someone who has a tracker synched (not because a tracker is measuring calories, but because it's using more personalized data to make estimates).

Many people have internalized common cultural myths about needing to eat tiny numbers of calories in order to lose weight, so it's not unusual to be surprised that one's calorie goal is as large as it is. That's not universal, though, of course.

PAV8888

So everything that Ann wrote above... is correct. Including that the only difference between pay and free MFP is that you can (incorrectly) choose to not see the adjustments when using the pay version.

There is only one thing that Ann missed... which is that the above applies only when things are working as expected. And that the values fully update at midnight and may change if you go to sleep or veg out before then.

Working as expected is... interesting.

When updates are happening on-time and correctly, Fitbit-MFP integration has been yielding correctly derived values for years now.

Based on late 2021/early 2022 information, Garmin-MFP integration yields correct eating goal values when you look on the MFP web site/apps; but incorrect values when you look at what it says you can still eat on Garmin.

And Apple integration sometimes results in off the wall results where the more you exercise the lower, instead of higher, your eating goal.

In the end the whole thing boils down to using your personal data as Ann mentioned... because that's really the only way!

NewTJ65

For me it is all about maintaining consistency and motivation. The extra calories I earn exercising every morning at 4:30 are necessary to keep myself on track. (Not burning out like so many times in the past.) Slow and steady is the mindset I am using as I pursue my goal of losing 60 pounds by November 3rd. (My 57th birthday). So far, I am losing at a rate of 1.5 pounds per week (26 pounds since 10/11/21) which to me is much faster than I had anticipated! And I literally BLOW IT many days. But I AM EXERCISING and EATING SIGNIFICANTLY LESS than I was eating. So..... Weight loss! And I am having fun! Starving all day and being miserable are no way to live. My life has changed is countless ways since starting this adventure and MFP has been a HUGE part of my success so far! Good luck to everyone!

cwolfman13

hicim705 wrote: »

I wonder about this. I had my FitBit synched with MFP but found that I 'was allowed' to eat way more than I even thought I should because of the calore defecit. Fro what I understand, if you **PAY** (of course) for MFP, the nubers get adjusted between what you should eat/how much you exercised. Of course, without this - it seems that what you burn is added back into what you can eat. Losing weight, no matter how you do it, is really based on calories in/calories out. Am I wrong?

You get an adjustment whether you use premium or the paid version. The adjustment that comes over from the device is a reconciling adjustment between the activity level you selected in MFP to your actual activity per your device. The size of that adjustment, if any, depends on what your activity level is set to in MFP vs what you're actually doing per your device. You would not get an adjustment if these two things were commensurate with each other, but it has nothing to do with premium or free versions.