New to my Fitness Pal

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chellyboy7
chellyboy7 Posts: 4 Member
in Introduce Yourself

Hi all, new to my fitness pal, always been active with lots of exercise but struggle with diet.
What are people’s thoughts on using the calories ‘gained’ by exercise when logging food? Is it worth sticking to the baseline calories or eating a bit more, interested to hear how people get on with both approaches.

Mark

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  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 37,121 Member

    IMO, exercise calories need to be accounted for somehow. They're calories we burned, after all.

    If someone sets up MFP for a moderate/slow weight loss rate and only does half an hour of moderate exercise 3 times a week or similar, it's probably fine to let the exercise calories increase the calorie deficit, speeding up weight loss a little.

    But ultra-fast weight loss is a bad plan in most cases: It increases health risks, can compromise appearance through things like hair thinning or unnecessarily much muscle loss, and raises the chance of failure because it's hard to stay with an extreme weight loss rate long enough to lose a meaningful total amount of weight.

    Therefore, if someone has a daily exercise schedule that's of higher intensity or longer duration, and especially if they're already trying for an aggressive weight loss rate, it's not going to be a great idea to ignore those exercise calories and go for fast loss.

    In between those extremes, it's a question of how much risk a person wants to take with health and failure odds, pretty much.

    Exercise calories can be accounted for the MFP way, by logging exercise when we do some (or syncing a fitness tracker to MFP) . . . or by averaging them into base calories using a TDEE calculator if a person wants to have the same calorie goal every day. Either of those can work: The difference is just the accounting method.

    For myself, I used the MFP method all through weight loss and 9+ years of successful weight maintenance since. My main exercise activity is weather dependent, and my exercise schedule varies seasonally. On top of that, I'm at a stage in life where some breaks in the exercise schedule are inevitable (illness, injury, surgical recovery, etc.).

    It works great for me to log exercise explicitly. Once I figured out my base calorie needs - starting with MFP's estimate, adjusting based on weight change experience after 4-6 weeks or so - my weight changes became quite predictable. I've made it a point to estimate the exercise calories thoughtfully and carefully, but I've always eaten all of them. Even when I've had periods of a month or thereabouts when I couldn't exercise, I could manage my bodyweight well. YMMV.

    Best wishes for success!

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