Calories and exercise

jayhall0407
jayhall0407 Posts: 5 Member
in Getting Started

Hi, I see that when you enter exercise, those calories are deducted from your total calories, so my question is should you still strive to reach the calorie goal or is the deficit a contributing factor to your weight loss?

Answers

  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 36,075 Member

    When you do exercise, generally the exercise calories should be added to your calorie goal for you to eat more, fueling the exercise. The only case I know where you should see exercise calories subtracted from your eating goal is if you have your MFP activity level set a little high for that day, have a fitness tracker syncing the exercise calories into MFP, and have negative adjustments turned on in MFP.

    For example, in that scenario, you'd get a negative adjustment if your MFP setting was "Very Active" but the fitness tracker saw you burning calories only at the "Lightly Active" level, even with the exercise included. Since you burned fewer calories that day than MFP expected based on the activity level setting, it would subtract calories from your eating goal.

    Other than that, exercise calories should give you more calories to eat, and MFP intends that you eat them. Losing weight too fast is a bad idea for health, and makes sticking to the process harder, besides. Some people worry that added exercise calories might be too high, so only eat some portion of them. I've always eaten all of them, lost weight fine doing that.

    I hope that makes sense.

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