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When do I up my calories?

shuga_shay
shuga_shay Posts: 29 Member
in Social Groups
I have an office job where I am at my desk the majority of the day. When I first started on MFP I considered myself sedentary but now I work out about 5-6 days a week at least 90 minutes each of those days. I reached a plateau last month and changed to lightly active because I was always hungry. Now I put it back down to sedentary, so now every time I work out I am negative and literally starving, so I have to eat my calories back. I am confused, a little guidance MFPals???

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  • heybales
    heybales Posts: 18,842 Member
    I have an office job where I am at my desk the majority of the day. When I first started on MFP I considered myself sedentary but now I work out about 5-6 days a week at least 90 minutes each of those days. I reached a plateau last month and changed to lightly active because I was always hungry. Now I put it back down to sedentary, so now every time I work out I am negative and literally starving, so I have to eat my calories back. I am confused, a little guidance MFPals???

    You hopefully noticed that your daily goal goes up by the amount you logged as exercise calories burned.

    That is supposed to be eaten so that the same deficit that was already included in your daily goal would remain.

    When you setup MFP profile, no exercise was planned or expected or put into your eating goals.
    Though you could create a goal of frequency and time of workouts, but that was fitness goal, not used in diet goal.

    So if and when you do finally exercise, you maintain that deficit by eating more.

    If you don't, you are leaving your body with precious little to operate normally on, let alone actually get much of anything out of your workouts.
    Hence your body has said enough, and balance out so you aren't losing anything.

    But put it back to Lightly Active, as the vast majority with FitBit's and BodyMedia type devices discover that even desk jobs on non-exercise days ends up actually being at Lightly Active level.

    Then log your exercise and eat it all back.

    Hopefully that will balance out your deficit probably be too great.

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