Eating exercise calories

Teeladog

I am sort of stunned by how many people on here don't eat their exercise calories. When I lost my 40 lbs. originally (I am here trying to lose the 10 lbs. that magically appeared again over the last 2 years when I stopped tracking what I ate) I ate every single one of my exercise calories. If I didn't eat them then I didn't lose any weight no matter how little I ate.

So...I am curious...do most people eat their exercise calories or not? What is your rationale either way?

mommymichellell

Hi there, pretty new to this. What are your excercise calories? Thank you I appreciate it.

samanthakatecallan

I eat mine but instead of setting my net to 1,200 it is set to 1,000 but I eat ALL my exercise calories back and I do my full net. I just came back but this is what originally worked for me. So I end up eating about 1,300 - 1,600 a day (not 1,000 thats my net). I set my net to 1,000 because MFP overestimates exercise calories burned and I found with my HRM this compensates for that and the fact that I can't always do exact measurements on my food it is like a cushion. But I always CONSUME over 1,200 usually over 1,400.

AlwaysWanderer

When I started I 3 months ago, I didnt eat my calories back. And was loosing. But reading about starvation mode etc I got convinced that you should. So I did for the last 2.5 months. Havent lost a single lb. So in the last week stopped eating them back and lost 2lbs already.
So, I'm going with the trial method. It didnt work for me to eat them back, so I won't. :happy:

xAdrianax

Hey, im on 1200 cals a day and i dont eat back my exercise calories. I burn up to 2000 every week.
I started off not eating them just to see how it worked out, and it worked fine for me and i didnt feel i was starving myself.
I've lost 20lbs in 6 weeks so i am very happy with how i do things, but different things work for different people/bodies!
Now and again i may go over cals by 50 to 100, but i dont stress as i know i have exercise cals to fall back on.

AlwaysWanderer

Hi there, pretty new to this. What are your excercise calories? Thank you I appreciate it.

They are calories that you burn during exercise. MFP creates your deficit without taking exercise into account, so in theory you would create too large a deficit if you didnt eat it back. search the topics, you will find millions of posts about it. :flowerforyou:

♥♥YoungMrs♥♥

I usually eat half back..not going to force the rest down if Im not hungry..ive lost 30 lbs

evonday

I try to eat half of my exercise calories.

My daily limit is 1,200 calories. Just for example, say I burn 200 cals, I would then make my goal 1,300 calories for the day. I'm giving myself some extra fuel for my body, but at the same time, I'm making my exercise count for just a little bit extra. And on days where I did exercise a lot, if after eating my 1,200 cals and half of what I burned I was still hungry, I'd grab an extra snack guilt free.

I only did that with cardio though. I didn't even count the cals burned doing strength training. It was too tedious.

That's what worked really well for me.

bjam1234

I tried eating them for a couple weeks and lost little to nothing - I suppose calories burned according to mfp must have been an overestimation of what I was doing?? Anyway - got fed up with that and went back to just eating my base level (set for 1lb per week which is 1300 for me) and accepting increased deficit from exercise as a bonus, unless I am really hungry in which case I assume I may need a little more food and will eat back part of the exercise for that day (perhaps 1/4 - 1/2). I should note that I do not hit up the gym like a lot of the members on here so my exercise is probably negligible by comparison (solid walk each day and additional tennis and yoga 2-3 times a week)

I hit a plateau early on and increased base level calories which helped. Next time things slow down I will reevaluate exercise cals but I am actually leaning towards cal cycling as the next thing to try since I really didnt see any benefit from eating exercise cals this time around (well, except that I got to eat more tasty food lol)