Calories changing!

carissaleeisherwood

Hi everyone!
I am on my 2nd day with this app and very fresh to the calorie counting!
My question is, why does my calories amount left go up after exercise? I had about 1300 calories left and now that I’ve been for a walk it has gone up to 1700.. do I have to consume all 1700 left to still lose weight?

Any insight is much appreciated!

robertw486

In a nutshell, MFP uses a method that calculates NEAT (Non-exercise activity thermogenesis) for your daily activity, accounting for your lifestyle and daily activity levels. It does NOT account for exercise beyond that, so when you exercise the number of available calories goes up.

One word of caution. Be realistic and check other sources beyond MFP for exercise logging. Some entries are fairly good, some not so great. For many if not most regular exercise styles, finding realistic calorie burns is not very difficult. As an example, walking on flat ground (for most people and realistic paces) will burn about - Body weight x .3 x miles walked.

And in any case, if your exercise logging is close, it's probably smart to eat back at least most of the calories. Eating back any less will help you lose weight quicker, but over time probably just leave you more hungry and tempted to overeat at some point to compensate.

Set a realistic goal (probably 1% or less of bodyweight per week is a good start), let MFP do most of the math work, and stick close to goal most days.

springlering62

Hi @carissaleeisherwood Welcome to mFP!

Yes, as @robertw486 says, you “earn back” calories for exercise.

Many people here only eat back half the earned calories, to leave a cushion til they know if their numbers are right.

A quality fitness tracker that syncs with MFP is your friend. It will help you understand the relationship between calories burned and food eaten. Good ones are Apple Watch, Garmin and Fitbit. There’s other more generic Amazon or temu type ones but people report problems syncing them.

400 calories for a walk seems excessive, unless it was over, say, 7 miles. Even at my heaviest (223+, the “+” being because I was too afraid to weigh….) I didn’t get calories like that walking, and I was a brisk walker.

Also speaking as someone who started by “just” walking (walking is the best!!!!), go to a running store and get fitted for proper shoes. I was an enthusiastic walker and often covered 10-15 miles a day. Cheap shoes made me lose a toenail, and caused awful foot pain. If you’d told my cheap *kitten* that shoes would make that kind of difference, I’d have fought you kicking and screaming. But lesson learned, they DO!!!!

AnnPT77

Without knowing more about what OP's day is like, what the tracker is, and how it's used, I'm wondering if the 400 calories is just the walk, or an overall calorie adjustment for activity that includes the walk and more. I know that there's a detail page where people can see the breakdown, but other threads make me believe not everyone is aware of that. OP says only that the calories went up by 400.

Even if 400 calorie is excessive for the walk, it may not be excessive as a generic adjustment. It's not super unusual for people who are new to set activity level lower than reality, since the border between sedentary/not very active and lightly active is fairly low. Some people who think they're sedentary move enough on the job or in home chores to count as lightly active, even if they have a desk job.

I'm not arguing that the 400 is for sure correct here, just quibbling that we may not have full relevant information to assess that.

FWIW, I'll add that another option for estimating or manually logging walking calories is this calculator, with the energy box set to "net":

https://exrx.net/Calculators/WalkRunMETs

Like MFP, it's METS-based, but it's a little more nuanced than MFP's built-in walking estimates.