Exercise calories

danaday28

I have lost 70lbs in last 3 years. I track everyday and am fairly active (retail worker and pilates 5x week). I recently have gained about 6lbs.
Should I be eating exercise calories?

spiriteagle99

Generally, yes, since that is the way MFP is intended to work, but really it depends on how much exercise you do and what kind. You don't want to be eating too few calories as it can impact both health and energy. I don't think Pilates burns a lot of calories, so it may not be worth logging. If an hour of exercise burns 100 calories, then you can eat or not and it won't make much difference. I'm a runner and walker and I burn 700+ calories on my running days, so for me it is a necessity that I eat back my exercise calories.

SafariGalNYC

You said you gained 6 lbs recently.. if you are still trying to lose weight, then that means you are eating too many calories or overestimating the exercise calories burned.

I personally never ate back any exercise calories unless it was heavy cardio. Pilates and yoga for me don’t burn a lot.

tomcustombuilder

If you’re gaining stop eating back exercise calories for a month and see what effect that has.

Retroguy2000

Generally, no. It's a flawed concept. That isn't how the human body works.

Your total calories in should match your planned weight change. How to know that? Track your calories and track your weight.

Presumably you've been eating more in the last six weeks, maybe drinking more alcohol too which can be high calorie, and perhaps you've been less active than normal too. A week or two of clean eating and getting back to a consistent working out schedule may shed a few pounds of temporary excess water weight. For the rest, you'll probably need to cut some calories.

AnnPT77

I always have and still do eat back carefully-estimated exercise calories, for 9+ years now during loss and maintenance. But that's not the only way to do it.

Speaking loosely, a person can either treat exercise as a separate add-on like I do so calorie goal differs on different days, or average it into daily calorie goal to have the same goal every day. Either of those methods can work, once a reasonably accurate calorie-needs estimate is dialed in.

Regardless of choice of methods, a person who's gaining weight on average over a many-weeks time period is probably eating over current maintenance calories. Adding more calories to the eating side is more than likely going to increase the weight gain. That's true whether it's conceptualized as exercise calories or some other source of calories.

There may be a very rare range of cases where someone's been eating way too low calories in order to lose weight, and triggering fatigue. That fatigue can be subtle or obvious, but it causes the person to burn fewer calories than expected, probably lose slower than expected; but it can combine with stress-related water retention to look like fat gain. This is a very rare case.

If you haven't been losing fast recently, that's not the likely case for you. I don't know your detail timeline, but 70 pounds over 3 years doesn't sound like an aggressively fast loss rate. Therefore, I'd say high odds that if you eat more, you'll gain weight faster, not lose weight.

If we knew more details, maybe we could say more. If you haven't reduced your calorie goal as you've lost weight, and loss tapered off gradually, you've probably found your maintenance calories (plus a little, to account for the gain). If you'd been losing at a good rate recently, and stopped suddenly for a small number of days/weeks or maybe even gained a little rather quickly for no apparent reason, then a temporary water retention increase is possibly a more likely explanation. There are other possibilities, but those are examples. Like I said, if we had more details, maybe we'd have other possible explanations.

If the gain was quite sudden with no change in lifestyle, and you haven't changed anything in your calorie intake or activity level, have you seen your doctor recently? There are some medical conditions that can cause weight gain or water retention, too. If it was gradual gain, maybe not an issue.

Best wishes!