Eating back the calories you burn excercising??

wendyjo3

To lose weight you need to consume fewer calories than your body burns over the course of the day. There is a healthy range for how far under you can be. You eat back your exercise cals to keep your total daily intake in that healthy range.

That's the basic concept. Whether or not you need to eat back cals to stay in that healthy range depends on what your daily caloric goal is, how much you are exercising, and personal variable (genetics, hormones, etc).

Well said!

llkilgore

I typically workout at night and I burn around 500 calories a day excericising which typically puts me under my limit for calories. I'm confused about whether or not i'm supposed to eat again until I am back at 1200 calories or not. I don't understand the point of working out if I turn around and eat again. Also I work out late so am I supposed to eat at midnight???

There's no problem with applying exercise calories earned late in the day to the following day. Eat last night's calories today, tonight's calories tomorrow, and so on. Your body won't know the difference and you won't have to worry about the accountability issues that might occasionally come up if you eat first in anticipation that you'll exercise later.

As for whether or not you should eat back the calories at all: Yes, I think so, but... You do need to be really careful that you don't over estimate the burn. A heart rate monitor is best, but if you're relying on MFP's notoriously generous database or on a fitness machine readout, then I wouldn't eat back more than about 2/3rds of the reported calories.

And you should exercise to rev up your metabolism, for your general health and fitness, and to look good naked, not to create a calorie deficit for weight loss. The required deficit is already baked into the base calorie budget, assuming you've set up the software as intended.