Eat your work out calories??

Dtho5159

I eat mine... Ive lost 50lb doing so.. I think its a matter of experiment.. Try either eating them back or not and see if it works. If not, try the other way. Im a very very hungry person so I easily can eat my calories each day and if I work out, I get hungrier from burning the calories so I almost always eat them back.

Xandralexa

It depends. Even though I'm on a 1290 caloric goal, I eat about 1400-1600 a day and burn the remaining cals with exercise.
Normally I don't eat them back. But I'm lightly active anyway, so I rarely burn a lot unless I'm eating something high in calories.

I also haven't had a problem losing about 2lbs a week doing this.

Cathy92

I try not to eat mine back, but I often do...If I get really hungry, then I eat them. If I'm not hungry, then I don't. I hope this will work in the long run.

crmhaske

To answer the question, I do not eat my workout calories. Exercise increases your metabolism. Any slight change to a person's metabolism by not eating those calories is counter balanced by the exercise itself. If I feel lethargic or even slightly out of energy I know that I am not eating enough and so I compensate for that. I don't eat because I need to reach some arbitrary number calories per day that has randomly been decided to be what I need. Dieting is an individual sport.

Starvation mode is a myth.

The following quote is from this website (http://www.dotfit.com/content-1459.html) which employs qualified professionals:

"Severely cutting calories will cause the metabolism to adjust slightly, but not enough to prevent fat loss

Remember that people around the world who truly die of starvation are not overweight when they expire. It’s true that when you severely cut calories your metabolism will make a slight adjustment, allowing your body to run on fewer calories—but it’s not a large compensation. If you need to lose weight and you are not, eat less and/or move more and forget about slowing your metabolism.

That said, the point is not to lose weight too quickly by drastically reducing calories because that method is generally not sustainable. Second, although there is a slight down regulation in metabolism in response to a very low calorie diet, the main reason it may appear to slow down more than it actually does is because the extremely low calorie intake is slowing YOU down. In other words, you become less energetic, forcing a reduction in your daily activities, therefore burning fewer calories overall. Crash dieting with excessively low calorie intake leads to low energy, so you burn fewer calories all day and work out less intensely. This leads to increased hunger, which in turn increased the chances of rebound and binge eating behavior. This can result in a calorie intake that temporarily exceeds your pre-diet intake, leading to a rapid re-accumulation of weight. This is easily misinterpreted as the results of a “damaged” metabolism. It is worth noting that any temporary, minor reduction in metabolic rate due to excessively low caloric intake is regained once caloric intake is increased. Your metabolism is not damageable. Take home message: Never blame failure on metabolism, no matter what anyone tells you! Simply move more."