HELP PLEASE - CALORIE BURN CONFUSION

reeyonce

Please can someone clear this up for me.

If I workout in the morning (which I do) and in the evening I decide to have a takeaway (which I did last night), in order to burn the calories from that takeaway do I have to exercise right away? Or can I workout as usual the next day and burn off the cals from last night? (obviously making sure to burn off the exact amount of cals consumed)

So basically, if you eat like **** one day, and don't burn it off straight away, has it already stored on your body so even if you workout the next day it won't count? Please help, I'm no expert! x

MelodyandBarbells

It'll count. Looking at your ticker I'm sure you apply the long term approach. You can exercise on Friday after enjoying a decadent meal on Monday and long term, it will contribute towards managing your weight, so long as you continue to eat at an over all deficit.

amusedmonkey

You can work an extra deficit at any time. It doesn't have to be right away. After all, the whole process of fat loss is based on burning away the calories you packed and stored in form of fat in the past months/years. For the purpose of organization and tracking, though, people tend to like working it off during the same or next day, or within the same week.

Liftng4Lis

If you use the phone app, it shows you a weekly accumulation of deficit. Lots of people go by the week rather than daily.

neandermagnon

you need to use a calculator to get an idea of how many calories your body is burning each day. This includes the calories your body burns just keeping your cells alive and your organs functioning (i.e. your BMR calories) and the calories you use moving around (activity calories) which includes all the moving around you do in a day including exercise. This is your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE)....

if you eat the same number of calories as your TDEE, your weight will stay the same. If you eat less you'll lose weight, if you eat more you'll gain weight.

If you eat more one day, you log all the food you ate, and let's say you had a takeaway and you were 300 calories over your TDEE that day, you can balance that out the next day either by eating 300 calories less or by doing 300 calories of exercise. It doesn't matter which (but most people find it easier to stick to their goal if they're not starving hungry, so exercising and eating more is usually the better option). It doesn't matter when you do the exercise, what matters is that at the end of the day you're eating fewer calories than you burn off.

Your calorie goal for MFP is not all of your TDEE calories... it's TDEE minus a few hundred calories, so if you eat your MFP calorie goal every day, you'll be eating less than your TDEE and losing weight. Even if you go over your calorie goal, you'll probably still not be eating more than your TDEE... but you will lose weight more slowly.

So to put it simply, eat the number of calories MFP tells you to eat each day.... if you do exercise, log that and eat the extra calories... so long as you are logging carefully this means you'll be eating less than your TDEE each day and you'll lose weight. If you want to do a bit of extra exercise because you were over your goal the previous day, then it really doesn't matter what time of day you do the exercises. Just make sure you're not making yourself get so hungry that you find it too hard to stick to your calorie goal. As your calorie goal on MFP is already less than your TDEE, you don't have to worry about the *occasional* day of being over... but if it happens regularly it'll add up and slow or even stall your weight loss.