exersise and the calories you burn

SonicaBE

does everyone eat the excersise calories they burn??? I thought not eating them was the jist. What am I missing? why am i getting that message that I am not eating enough?

GFreg

Generally, I have not been eating my exercise calories but that is because I have a lot of weight to lose and because being big I eat a lot of food already.

The reasoning behind eating exercise calories is to prevent people from under eating. Someone who is trying to lose 1lb a week should be eating 500 under what their maintenance level is. Maintenance level is going to be your BMR, what your body burns even if you laid in bed all day + the calories burned from normal activities. If you work behind a desk and sit down all day then you won't burn a lot from during the day.

When you start with MFP and fill out a profile they ask you how tall you are, how much you weigh, what level activity you do each day and what goals you would like to see in weight lost per week. They then give you an estimated number of calories you should be eating to reach that goal. When you exercise they add calories back to your goal number.

So say your goal is to lose 1 lb a week and they tell you you should eat 1700 calories to reach that goal. If you workout and burn 500 calories, you can eat 2200 calories and still be losing 1 lb a week. If you don't eat back your exercise calories, you have basically only taken in 1200 calories for that day. Anything below 1200 net calories is usually not enough food to effectively power your body.

I hope this makes sense and helps. Let me know if you have any questions and I will do my best to answer them.

SonicaBE

Hi GFreg, it totally does, and thank you for the detailed explanation. Good luck to you!