To eat or not to eat???? Exercise calories

meggonkgonk

Eat them. You want your calorie dairy to be close to "0" at the end of the day.

WHY?

Because it is the way the MFP tool was designed. If you go and read the FAQ's and look at your "GOALS" page you will see that your goal is meant to be in NET calories. When you sign up, MFP calculates an estimate of how much your body burns in a day- based on age, height, weight, gender and activity level (this number can be found on your "GOALS" page as well, it's labelled "Calories Burned from Daily Activity"). Then you select how much you wish to lose per week, and MFP creates a deficit base on this. For 1lb, this means 500 calories a day.

This often leads to confusion because most diet and exercise plans use both exercise and diet to create this deficit. For those plans however, if you miss a workout your deficit is reduced. With MFP you have to account for and properly fuel each specific workout. Reduced calories over a long period of time (typically weeks) often leads your metabolism to slow to preserve itself, so you will need continually less calories to lose. Not only does this throw off all of MFP's calculations for you (making the tool essentially useless) it also deprives your body of necessary nutrition and energy. Where as if you keep your calories up, your metabolism will stay where and how it is- so you will be able to eat more (especially if you are getting these calories in a healthy way) and still lose consistently.

Eating less and doing more is great to an extent, but like everything else it should be done in moderation. Many of us are on MFP to relearn eating habits- eating enough is just as important as not eating too much.

I hope this clarifies the why behind eating exercise calories.

Best,
Gonks