How many of your exercise calories do you eat?

Jayme2787

I hardly ever eat the "extra" calories I earned by exercising for 2 reasons.

1. I occasionally have over calorie days, so I figure it all balances out in the big picture.

2. I've been watching my diet and exercising for years but my weight has barely budged, except to go up. So I'll take any advantage to help me lose weight I can get. I'm trying to keep my energy expended to calories consumed ratio as high as possible.

I've lost about 5 pounds in the last month so I'll stick with this strategy until it doesn't work.

Ditto. I lose really slowly, so as long as I'm not starving myself or feeling any negative effects, I stick with my calorie goal and don't eat any of my exercise calories. I don't even track my exercise on here anymore just to keep from confusing my extra calories with what I usually allow myself a day.

thatfitgeek

I donate mine to less fortunate inner-city youth

zenhiker2014

I'm fairly new here (been on mfp for about a month) so I don't have the experience many previous posters bring to this discussion, but here's my thinking:

In the past I've worked on the "bigger deficit = faster weight loss" assumption and while I did lose weight, it wasn't fast and it didn't teach me good habits. Since joining mfp I've tried to follow the recommended process including eating back exercise calories. I just try to leave 100-200 calories "on the table" at the end of the day to allow for logging errors. I find that if I don't eat back most of the calories, I don't feel good and am irritable, plus am more likely to impulse eat.

I use a fitbit to get my estimated daily burn, and mapmyfitness for activities that the fitbit doesn't capture well, so I'm not relying on mfp to estimate my daily calorie use. It just does the math for me to show what I can eat and still reach my target deficit for steady weight loss.

For me, being able to up my calorie allowance is great motivation for exercising more. I like to exercise so on weekends it's no problem, but during the week my job can can be all consuming and I need that extra motivation to carve out some time for fitness.

Bottom line, I'm losing weight faster by following this strategy than I ever did before, I feel good, and I almost never feel hungry. Of course YMMV.

shanaber

I think when you are first starting out it is important to eat back at least some of the exercise deficit (like many have said MFP overstates the amount). It is motivating and initially you may not know your body signals for when you truly need more, I know I sure didn't. Now I listen to my body and know when I need to eat more and I can definitely tell when I am on a run or working out that I haven't eaten enough.

November_Fire

I don't know how much I burn, so I just use it as a buffer to my 1500 guideline for the day. I eat around 1500, if I go over no sweat, I am 'eating back' the exercise I did. It's also a buffer for logging errors or weight estimates - I'm not weighing every apple, and then its remaining core, or every teaspoon of nutmeg, or that single Haribo sweet someone offered me. If I'm hungry, I eat. No denial here. I assume I needed it, and if I were to go consistently over the 1500 each day I figure I'm in a place where I need to set a new guideline.

levitateme

I think it's a very individual thing and depends a lot on what activity you are doing and how accurately you are able to estimate your calorie burn. On WW, I used to eat all of my activity points back with no trouble whatsoever. I have found on MFP that I can sometimes have trouble losing if I eat all of my exercise calories. My suggestion would be to start at eating 75% of them back. If you aren't losing at the rate you should be, cut back to 50%. If you are losing too fast, go on up to 100%. Just be willing to play with the numbers and give your body a few weeks to adjust in between changes so you can see the full effect.

Also, the consensus seems to by the MFP is pretty accurate on calorie burn for walking, but most other things it does over estimate. And that exercise machines also typically over esimtate a little. Just something to keep in mind.

This. If you are mostly certain that your calorie burn is accurate eat them all. If you're relying on MFP's or machine's estimates, eat just a portion. I use a hrm and shapesense's hr based calculator to estimate my burns and feel confident eating most of them back.

tattedbarbz

Any PT's i've asked have said it's not a good idea to eat them back - unless you're working out to an extreme (like all day bootcamps). Even Jessica Smith says not to on her website. Some people use it as an excuse to eat bad foods because they've exercised enough.. but that's not the point. It's especially ridiculous with people who log everyday things like sex and housework and then eat those calories back. Aslong as you don't feel really hungry, then you shouldn't eat the calories back for the sake of it.