Eating back exercise calories

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michaelraine
michaelraine Posts: 17
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I rarely eat back my exercise calories I have burned. My theory is if I eat all them back plus my daily calorie intake I will gain weight. Please help me understand how if I eat back my calories that I work off plus my daily alloted calories, how I won't put the weight back on. Hard for me understand how when I was losing I couldn't eat a lot. Now that I have dropped the pounds and I am trying to maintain that I can eat so much more.

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  • arfenarf
    arfenarf Posts: 5 Member
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    If you've used MFP to set your goals, it will feed back the number of calories you should be targeting. When you were losing weight, the number MFP would give you was designed with a modest-but-appropriate deficit in mind - built right in, to keep things simple. Exercise calories are real burn and you should eat them back if you want to keep that smart-modest deficit in place.

    If you didn't eat back the exercise calories, you'd be in a bigger-and-maybe-not-so-good deficit, in terms of your long-term health and happiness.

    Now that you're maintaining, you can adjust your goals so the deficit is no longer there - you're only likely to get about 250 - 500 calories/day back if you were being methodical about it while losing: it isn't a huge adjustment. And then you eat exercise calories back, because you are happy with your weight and want to fuel that fine, strong body well so you can use it to go play, exercise, get stronger - whatever you want.
  • meganjcallaghan
    meganjcallaghan Posts: 949 Member
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    MFP assumes no extra exercise beyond whatever you do in day to day life. That's what it's basing your calorie allotment on. If you go and burn a buttload of calories in an extra workout that wasn't part of MFP's original assessment of how many calories you should eat, then you should be eating at least some of them back. I am 'lightly active' for most of the day, plus I do a run every day....the length of the run varies, so I don't incorporate that into my daily activity level. I add it in as exercise. So, having just run 18 kilometers, I'd say I should probably be eating back SOME of that burn of over 1000 calories since MFP is set up thinking I'm 'lightly active'.
  • crose0056
    crose0056 Posts: 105 Member
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    When I started I ate 1200 daily. All exercise calories I ate back it make it easier to eat more and still lost weight.
  • diannethegeek
    diannethegeek Posts: 14,776 Member
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    You had some really good feedback in your previous thread. Congratulations about reaching your goal and transitioning into maintenance. That's a great accomplishment! Have you been able to increase your calories at all, so far? I know you mentioned that you were having a hard time even reaching your pre-exercise goal, so I hope that you're having an easier time with that.

    http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/818082-exercise-calories-again-wtf

    This thread goes into some of the more technical details about how MFP sets your goal and why it adds extra calories after exercise. Maybe it will help you to understand some of the process?

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