Eat back exercise calories or not....

Steffani911

Common pitfalls of MFP method (NEAT method) is overestimating calorie burn. A lot of people just workout and go to the database and put "vigorous" effort or whatever and get like a gazillion calories burned for 30 minutes of swimming or something completely unreasonable. You should always have some kind of reasonableness check on your burn and you should do a bit of research on burning calories and what exercises burn what...there are a lot of formulas out there that are far more accurate that some data base of online calculator. I personally never logged more than 10 calories per minute, and that was an intense workout...around 5 calories per minute for a nice walk.

For this to work, you also have to be as precise as possible with intake which means you should be weighing pretty much anything that has weight as a serving suggestion and measuring cups/spoons for just about everything else. If you eat out a lot, you can have issues in that restaurants are given a lot of leeway in there calorie estimations. This is also an issue if you eat a lot of prepackaged type of meals...I believe they are allowed something like 20% error or something.

^Yes, yes, and yes! Food intake being more that thought and burn being less that thought. Weight everything you put in your mouth.

geebusuk

. Other theories are "generally accepted" by whom?

That a higher deficit means more muscle loss.
Haven't got the time this second to dig through studies, but a quick google got me this:
https://www.pacifichealthlabs.com/blog/could-you-be-losing-muscle-instead-of-fat-heres-how-not-to-do-that/

n individuals who moderately reduced their daily caloric intake, 91% of the loss was fat and only 9% was muscle. But in subjects who severely reduced their daily caloric intake, fat represented 48% of the total weight loss and muscle 42%.

Not sure of protein levels in that study.


From Lyle's article.

Now, what happens to your muscle mass ultimately depends on the balance between these two competing processes. I’ve tried to illustrate this below with three possible scenarios.

Protein synthesis > Protein breakdown = Muscle mass increases
Protein synthesis = Protein breakdown = No change in muscle mass
Protein synthesis < Protein breakdown = Muscle mass decreases

Assuming your goal is bigger muscles, clearly 1 is the goal. But this also means that there are two primary ways that we can potentially impact on muscle growth. We can either increase protein synthesis, decrease protein breakdown or do both at the same time. And doing both at the same time would be expected to have the biggest impact.

There’s one more factoid you need to know which is this: heavy resistance training increases the rates of both protein synthesis AND breakdown. That is, training doesn’t just turn on one or another, it turns on both. This is probably a mechanism to help with the previously mentioned remodeling process. But both happen following training.

I would suggest that cardio while not eating much should also increase protein breakdown.
On that basis, an obvious way to prevent it is to offer another fuel - more calories from carbs.

eayockey

I would suggest that cardio while not eating much should also increase protein breakdown.
On that basis, an obvious way to prevent it is to offer another fuel - more calories from carbs.

You are correct that cardio on a deficit will catabolize muscle more quickly than resistance training. This is because anerobic energy systems (Phosphagen and Glycolytic) produce energy (ATP) by breaking down carbs. The aerobic system (Oxidative) breaks down proteins and fats to produce energy (ATP). I should mention that you don't need a tremendous amount of carbs in your system to prevent catabolism during anaerobic exercise--about 30g (a gatorade or banana) prior will do.

Protein breakdown can refer to dietary protein as well--this is why eating more protein spares muscle loss, and why it's especially important to eat more protein if you intend to do a lot of cardio on a deficit.

alexuh

I eat back some/most/all. It depends if I'm hungry or not. If I want them, I know they're there. I don't go out of my way to eat them I just listen to my body. Sometimes that will mean I eat more the next day - but who cares. I didn't want the calories on the day so it would have been pointless to eat when I wasn't hungry. Basically I do what I feel. :bigsmile: