Exercise Calories?

amyhbrown

Do you eat your exercise calories? I earn 500-600 calories a day for exercise but don't typically eat them. Just wondering what the general consensus is: to eat or not to eat??

rachmcnern

I don't know if I am in the minority, but I eat those calories! It says that you earned themalso when you complete the entry, it says you will weigh "X" amount if you keep eating the same, it comes out to about a pound a week that you are losing. Hopefully that makes sense :laugh:

NanoReefDiver

Eat

dreamdealer

eat most of them, always have 40-50% left over. Exercise calories are my cheats

arw3b3

It is very important to eat back your exercise calories:)

ksloop00

I don't eat them. I see a dietician and she said not to eat them. I've gotten a lot of heck from people on here because that's the advice I've been giving to people. But basically, saying it's ok to eat your exercise calories is just an excuse people use so they feel ok about eating more.

Stormywinter

I don't normally eat my exercise calories. Sometimes if I know that I'm eating out I exercise just to get the extra calories to use for that meal. It keeps me accountable. I hope that the extra calories earned will help my weight loss. Hope that helps.

mkcalvert

I try to only have 100 or less..bc from what I've seen mfp already figures in ur deficit

lnosgood

Most days i'll eat some of them. Then some days i'm extremely hungry so i eat them all. I try to only eat maybe 0-20% of them though. But i'm probably one of the minorities. I know most people i've talked with eat them all. But with all this water i've been drinking, I'm just not hungry enough to eat most of them. Make sure though that you ARE eating your protein since that is what helps rebuild your muscles after working out. Seems to be working though since i'm down 11 lbs in 3 weeks.

ktlajm29

you are not supposed to eat them. even though the my fitness pal has the net calories and your exercises take away from that I have read in many books and articles that you are not supposed to. go to google and type in metabloism calculator and you can fill in all of your information it will tell you what you normally burn in a day. and then you already have the amount of calories you are supposed to burn. So you take your metabolism subtract you calorie intake and multiply by 7 which will give you how many calories you burn in a week. 3500 is in 1 pound. So if you are working out everyday or 5 days a week at 500-600 calories a day then multiply 500 or however many calories you burn in a day by the amount of days you work out and add that to your metabolism minus your calorie intake. sorry if this is sounding confusing. here's an example so im supposed to eat 1200 calories per day my metabolism is 1500 and i work out 5 days a week aprox. 400 calories per work out. so
400 x 5 =2000 and
1500-1200= 300 x 7=2100
so i am burning 4100 calories per week so thats about 1pound per week.
So if i ate the extra calories that i burned off then i would not be losing weight. the main point of working out is to burn fat and eating the calories you burned just put you back where you started.

lschramm

Let me be the first to post this...

http://shouldieatmyexercisecalories.com/

ksloop00

Thank you ktlajm29, FINALLY someone gets it!!

DustinBorror

I think this is debated pretty much alllllll the time on here. - myfitnesspal already figures in how many calories you need to eat in order to stay at the correct calorie deficit in order to lose however many pounds you typed in as a goal per week. That is assuming no exercise. Exercising on top of that would give you an even greater deficit, but at some point your body's metabolism will slow down if you have too great of a deficit every day. That's why people recommend to eat the exercise calories, to keep at your original calorie deficit.