Eat back half of excercise calories?

LivingtheLeanDream

Just eat at your calorie goal (10x your healthy goal weight... again, what my doctor told me).
.

That would mean I would only get to eat 1300 cals - I wouldn't be happy on that AT ALL lol

currently I am just a few pounds from my goal weight - I use the TDEE method/Fitbit and eat up to 2000 cals a day. I lose 1/2lb on the weeks I'm being honest/restrictive, the weeks I stay the same, I'm just eating too much.

MFP has me set at 1500 so I eat back around half my exercise cals daily - Fitbit shows me at an average TDEE of 2300, therefore I try to eat at 15% deficit = 1945 cals total.

Its about finding your 'perfect' number to eat at and lose...and that takes trial and error

SezxyStef

MFP over estimates workout calories! I don' think we really burn that many calories, its misleading:mad:

Not for everyone...

or they are kidding themselves on what they are doing

or they are under estimating intake...

Too many variables to make definitive statements like that.

lemurcat12

I see a lot of people say that they do this. Is this different than using the Net Calories that MFP calculates? I eat about 1550 and workout about 350 to get to my 1200 goal. It is working for me, but I am curious if some are doing it differently.

If it is working for you, there's your answer.

How accurate the exercise calories are depends on the exercise and the person. (There's a lot of variation depending on how hard you say you were working, for example.) When I first started I did 1250 plus exercise calories and basically ate back almost all of them (I did not log stuff like cleaning or daily walking around, but only intentional exercise), and lost MORE than MFP said I should. After I got a Fitbit I realized this was because I was not sedentary but lightly active based on daily activity and I started using Fitbit to calculate extra calories and found it to be pretty much right on for me.

Now I have a higher goal but let Fitbit do negative adjustments (my goal is to avoid ever having them, though), and find that some calorie counts (like running) from MFP seem right on whereas other (like elliptical or circuit training) strike me as unrealistic given either calories per minute or it's inability to judge how hard I was really working, so I manually adjust those.

Anyway, that's all a digression. The point is that it's working for you, so keep it up!

lemurcat12

My doctor told me to ignore "net" or exercise calories.
1 - most people underestimate what they eat
2 - most people, and machines, and MFP, overestimate calories burned

Just eat at your calorie goal (10x your healthy goal weight... again, what my doctor told me).
Once in a while, if you're hungry at the end of the day, have 1/3 to 1/2 of your exercise calories for a snack or larger meal, but don't make a habit of it.

If you're losing weight as expected, keep doing what you're doing.
If not, change.

Most people is the key here, although I'm not even sure that's true for people on MFP.

When I started I was doing 1250 plus exercise calories (my goal is 120) and lost about 3 lbs/week eating the exercise calories. I guess your doctor's assumptions about my logging would have been wrong, and obviously eating 1200 with eating back exercise would have been too extreme.

Now my goal is still 120, so your doctor allegedly would say I should eat 1200 no exercise calories even though I do lots of biking miles and am training for a half marathon so commonly run 6-12 miles at present. I'm reasonably sure that would be a very bad idea. I think advice like this that ignores specifics--like here the fact that what the OP is doing works--is unwise. Clearly when your doctor talked to you he or she had more specifics.

mgorodetzer

I try not to eat what I burn off at the gym. If my calorie count is 1300 and I've eaten like 400 something for lunch and burn say 500, I don't eat back what I burned and still count that i've eaten 400 something. I go on tteh idea I have 800 something left to eat. So far it's been working for me, not totally sure how healthy it is but whatever works, right?

heybales

I try not to eat what I burn off at the gym. If my calorie count is 1300 and I've eaten like 400 something for lunch and burn say 500, I don't eat back what I burned and still count that i've eaten 400 something. I go on tteh idea I have 800 something left to eat. So far it's been working for me, not totally sure how healthy it is but whatever works, right?

Don't know if healthy or not, but it seems to work, therefore do it.

(I say seems, because you likely have no idea how much muscle mass you are losing, and the ill effects of that later, if not sooner).

Interesting philosophy anyway if applied to other things in life.