Balancing Exercise with the post-exercise calories

horizonflight

Hi, I'm new here and have a few questions. I've just recently started working out. However, I have a full-time job that doesn't really allow me to work out during my work hours 0630-1700. I try to eat properly and so I have breakfast lunch and dinner and some snacks in-between. Although I work out in the morning with a large group of people it doesn't seem to help with the weight loss. So I work out in the evenings by going to the pool to swim or going on a brisk walk/jog with my dogs. But the problem I'm really running into is that I understand the method behind the madness of eating the calories you've burned to keep your body from going into starvation mode but I usually fill this thing out at night so I can't really stuff my face at night time to make up the calories I was supposed to eat to make up for the exercising. So what do I do?

lilchino4af

If you know what you're going to do and for how long, you can log it and eat according to how many calories you anticipate burning so you can eat those exercise cals throughout the day instead of waiting until afterwards. Doing this also gives you motivation to workout in the evening if the evening comes around and you don't really "feel like" working out

NavySailor

Good evening horizon...what type of "group" excercise are you doing in the morning? Morning excercise is probably the absolute BEST way to lose weight, inches and body fat....I will keep this basic and please excuse me if you this is something you already do know...when you wake up in the morning, you don't have much of anything left from what you ate the day/night before...so in the morning when you work out, what is your body going to use for fuel? For a little while it will use stored glycogen...after that your body had to create its own energy source...there are two basic ways the body will get energy...from proteins in your muscles (not really what we want and I will explain how you can prevent this) or fat! We want to use the fat obviously. My suggestion to you is this...eat something very small...maybe a medium sized apple right before you go work out in the morning...this will give you a little energy boost but most important, it gives your body just enough calories to get started without losing any muscle...it takes a few minutes for the body to start burning fat....now there are a LOT of opinions about whether working out in the morning or the evening is best for body fat/weight loss...I subscribe to the belief that the morning's are great for burning body fat and the evenings are great for overall conditioning....that said and like I said there are other opinions on this and the debate will continue for ever I feel....a question that I do have to ask is this...what are you doing for morning workouts? If you are looking to start losing some weight and burning some fat, I tend to believe you are doing some sort of cardio....hopefullyt hat is what your doing. With regards to your question about calories...in a perfect world we would get all of our calories at the right time when our bodies really need them...I eat 6 meals a day on this schedule...breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner and then a snack. Don't fear eating later at night...there is nothing wrong with it....Now don't go making that last snack a Big Mac or anything but a couple hundred calories before bed isn't all that bad for you.
Sorry for rambling on so much...hope this helps just a little..

horizonflight

@Navy - I'm in the Army, have been for the better of 8 years. Unfortunately over the past 8 years I've also had 2 kids both with medical conditions that make you gain weight that is hard to lose. So as your username states I would assume you know all about PT. The only problem is that I have a "low-impact" profile as I have knee problems the doctors can't seem to figure out the cause of (Go Army doctors for fixing us right up) so I am unable to participate in unit running. Our unit actually sponsors a cross-fit guy to come out on Tuesdays and Thursdays so I get some "low-impact" workout there, but not much since I can't really do deep knee bends or anything like that (to include the side-straddle hop [high-impact] and other activities including impact or bending knees). I've found that keeping on a 2000 calorie diet a day is probably smarter than cutting calories to 1500 then burning 500 and making up for them at the end. As far as evening work-outs I do some jogging until it hurts but mostly walking and swimming. So I'm not sure where I'm going wrong since I've been stuck at this weight for quite some time. And going on two deployments doesn't help either since I was usually 18 on and 6 off. Depriving your body of sleep to go to the gym or do other exercises isn't really much of an option and you have to sustain yourself in a combat element so how else to do it but eat food? Now I wasn't overeating but I wasn't exactly exercising and it doesn't seem to go away... even before I signed up for this site.