Eating and Exercising

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breakyoface
breakyoface Posts: 160 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
So...I have a question for you guys! I started working out again almost 2 weeks ago..walking/jogging on the treadmill for 70 minutes and my daily goal is 1700(according to MFP) a day and I haven't been eating back my calories because my nutritionist told me to just eat between 1600-1900 calories when exercising and 1800 when not and that I shouldn't even count my exercising calories because it's not very accurate. Ok well, on MFP it says after exercising I eat about 1000-1200. SO my question is, do you think it could eventually cause me to go into starvation mode?

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  • lisaabenjamin
    lisaabenjamin Posts: 665 Member
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    Nope, because starvation mode doesn't exist, at least not in the sense that many people seem to think it does!!

    Starvation mode happens when you are seriously deprived of calories below your basal metabolic rate for a prolonged period of time. It's when you consume so few calories that your body starts to burn protein (mostly derived from your muscles) because there is no stored fat or carbohydrate left to burn for energy. The only people you will usually see in 'starvation mode' are people who are actually starving - e.g. those pics of starving children in Africa or anorexic models.

    Netting 1000-1200 calories isn't going to put you in starvation mode, especially if you're eating nutritious food and taking a healthy amount of exercise. It's not ideal, but it's not even close to genuine starvation.

    ETA: You need to eat sufficient calories to fuel your activity while not eating so much that you gain weight. There are two ways you can do that - either work out your TDEE -10-20% (which gives you a calorie goal that already factors in your usual activity level so you don't need to count exercise calories), or the MFP method (which gives you a calorie goal that doesn't factor in exercise, meaning you count and eat back your exercise calories. If you are using the MFP method and your NET calories at the end of the day are 1000-1200 then you should be eating more to eat back some of those earned calories! But yes, the calorie counts for exercise on MFP or on gym equipment are not that accurate which is why it is recommended to only eat back some of them.

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