Do people eat their exercise calories

gbancroft1025

I’m not sure if to use calories from exercise 🤷‍♀️

cmriverside

I ate them.

Here's a couple explanations:

https://support.myfitnesspal.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032625391-How-does-MyFitnessPal-calculate-my-initial-goals


https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/818082/exercise-calories-again-wtf/p1


You have to understand the numbers in order to make a decision.

Bottom line?

Log your food and exercise, in a month you'll have good trending data and you can adjust if necessary.

It's what we all had to do, and it's really the only way to figure it out once you know the basics.

AnnPT77

Short answer: If you estimated your calorie goal by including intentional exercise in your activity level setting, don't add extra calories when you exercise. That would be double counting exercise calorie burn. If you didn't consider exercise in your activity level setting, then add exercise and eat those calories, too.

Longer answer: What really matters is your actual weight change over 4-6 weeks. Losing aggressively fast is a bad plan.

If someone chooses a slow weight loss rate, and doesn't do a lot of exercise, it's probably fine to let the exercise increase weight loss pace. If someone doesn't include exercise in their calorie goal (through either method), chooses a fast/aggressive weight loss rate, then does a bunch of exercise on top of that, it's not going to end well. Fast loss increases health risks, risk of giving up, and more. It's a bad plan.

In between, it's a judgement call about how much risk a person wants. I wanted loss to be pretty easy, wanted my exercise performance (and general energy level) to stay high, plus don't want to risk my health. I chose a moderate weight loss rate, estimated my calorie needs without considering exercise, added and ate back my exercise calories . . . through just under a year of losing from obese to a healthy weight, and 8 years of maintaining a healthy weight since. It worked fine.

As long as a person takes exercise calorie burn into account somehow, either method can work fine. Not considering exercise in the estimates, but doing a bunch of it? Probably counter-productive.

Just my opinion, though.

tomcustombuilder

Some do some don’t. You have to be careful to not overestimate exercise calorie burn. Some people add back 50% of their exercise calories for a safety net.

The true test of your decision to either eat that calories or not eat that calories is to be consistent with what you’re doing for 4 to 6 weeks and review your progress or lack of it at that time and then make the necessary changes

Remember to not figure your exercise activity in your activity level for your baseline calories

GazJol

If your goal is to be in a caloric deficit, then you generally shouldn't. In saying that, if you’ve burned a heap of active calories- say 800 or more in a day. Then you should eat more to prevent your daily deficit being too drastic.
You can disable the active calories MFP adds on top of your daily goal in settings.

cmriverside

GazJol wrote: »

If your goal is to be in a caloric deficit, then you generally shouldn't. In saying that, if you’ve burned a heap of active calories- say 800 or more in a day. Then you should eat more to prevent your daily deficit being too drastic.
You can disable the active calories MFP adds on top of your daily goal in settings.

Read that link I posted above, the one about "How Does Myfitnesspal Calculate..."

If you have your "Activity Level" entered honestly and correctly, if you've set your Goal for weight loss reasonably AND you're logging food accurately then yes, eat back the exercise calories. Lots of people are not that accurate so a hundred calories of yardwork may just balance out, but it is sensible to read the explanation and understand it.

With that said, sure, a walk around the block may not be worth logging for its 30 calories. But an hour of purposeful exercise without additional fuel is going to cause problems over time. 300 calories is a lot of food for someone trying to get by on 1200-1400 daily calories. Maybe not the first time it happens, but it will cause issues with hunger.

AnnPT77

GazJol wrote: »

If your goal is to be in a caloric deficit, then you generally shouldn't. In saying that, if you’ve burned a heap of active calories- say 800 or more in a day. Then you should eat more to prevent your daily deficit being too drastic.
You can disable the active calories MFP adds on top of your daily goal in settings.

IMO, It would be better to understand the weight management math, and apply it correctly - that's the best if your goal is to be in a calorie deficit while sustaining good health and energy level alongside. It's not that complex to do. Cmriverside's comments are accurate.

Furthermore, the exercise calories can be averaged into base calorie goal rather than added separately: As long as the math is applied correctly, either method will work, and should result in approximately the same average calorie intake.

As an aside, disabling active calories is only possible for people who have premium MFP. It's not possible in the free version.

Personally, I ate every delicious, carefully-estimated exercise calorie - added separately BTW - all through just under a year of losing from obese to a healthy weight, and for 8 years of successful weight maintenance since. Since I lost at a pretty good clip, I don't think adding/eating those exercise calories kept me from being in a deficit.

cmriverside

As an aside, disabling active calories is only possible for people who have premium MFP. It's not possible in the free version.

Well, you don't have to log exercise.

Help me understand what you mean here?

"Active" calories would only apply if you have a fitness device synced to myfitnesspal. Otherwise, just set calories where you want them and don't log anymore additional calories from a synced device...i.e. don't sync and don't manually add workouts to "Exercise."

amirite?

cmriverside

LOL not sure why this has to be so complicated!

AnnPT77

cmriverside wrote: »

As an aside, disabling active calories is only possible for people who have premium MFP. It's not possible in the free version.

Well, you don't have to log exercise.

Help me understand what you mean here?

"Active" calories would only apply if you have a fitness device synced to myfitnesspal. Otherwise, just set calories where you want them and don't log anymore additional calories from a synced device...i.e. don't sync and don't manually add workouts to "Exercise."

amirite?

I was responding directly to the PP that said "You can disable the active calories MFP adds on top of your daily goal in settings", and using the same words that post used. I was simply pointing out that IMU you (anyone) can't do that if you don't have premium MFP, so someone using free MFP has no reason to search for that setting.

If a person has premium, the exercise calories "off" setting will let a person log exercise, but won't add the calories to their goal, IMU. As you'd guess, I wouldn't turn that setting to "off", personally.

Of course a person who has free MFP can simply not log exercise, not sync a tracker, or log exercise but set the calories to 1 calorie burned so there's no real impact on calorie goal.

It's this setting that the PP was talking about:

SweatLikeDog

Eat your calories back. Just make sure you don't overestimate your calorie burn. If you ate 1000 calories and burned 3000 calories the same day, you would be stressing your body severely and you wouldn't recover well from that burn. You would lose fat, muscle and essential nutrients. Keep it up and you would get sick and your metabolism would slow down significantly. The goal of diet is to lose fat, not fat + muscle + nutrients.

Alatariel75

I don't eat them regularly, because I know MFP wildly overestimates mine (they're largely from walking), but I tend to have 1-2 days a week where I go over my usual calories, so I consider that kind of 'banking' them for when I need some wiggle room

Jamieleisa777

I don’t use mine at all. Mine come mainly from swimming 50 minutes 3 times per week. In the long run, I may need to begin to eat them but for right now I’m not feeling hungry or tired eating my base calories alone.

Hobartlemagne

I eat back, but usually only protein drinks

tomcustombuilder

No. My exercise routine is consistent so I just use the TDEE method.


Trying to be accurate with the calorie burn on the app just adds another dimension to being inaccurate. Plus I’m lazy and that’s just more than I want to take on. TDEE has been working for 20 plus years so if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

Some people are successful with tracking calories burned so good for them….

yirara

I'm inconsistent with exercise and hence the TDEE method would not work for me. I eat back my exercise calories. I do have a good grip on them. But yeah, not eating anything back would be foolish for me as I'd burn out in no time.

westrich20940

MFP is set up for you to eat back exercise calories - that's why it adds them.

If you used the guided setup to calculate your calorie goal - it is *already* at a deficit if you said you wanted to lose weight. Then, if you burn more calories through working out it will create more of a deficit - depending on your numbers you could end up consuming too few calories if you don't eat back your exercise calories.

IF you calculated your daily calorie goal using something other than the guided set up in MFP - then it might be different.....

EDIT: there will be multiple answers from people about whether they ate them back or not. I lost ~25lbs in ~9months and I ate back 100% of my exercise calories.

HoneyBadger302

Sort of - I prefer a TDEE method where I average my weekly expenditure and calories so I'm eating roughly the same amount each day. This does require consistency working out and may require adjusting over time, but I find I'm much more able to be consistent with food if I know about how much I get each day (also makes meal planning a lot easier).

nossmf

TDEE does make meal planning easier. But some people (myself included) are more hungry on days we exercise, less hungry on rest days. The TDEE method would mean some days I'd feel hungry still (workout days) while others would feel slightly stuffed (rest days). For me, I prefer eating more when I move and burn more, so I keep my MFP setting to "sedentary" and eat back what I burn...about half of my cardio burn, as I'm less sure if that number is accurate, and every...single...calorie of lifting burn, lol.