Net Calories - New Approach

CassiHutchings

Okay let's talk about net calories for a sec. If I'm correct, as long as you eat at least 1200 calories, or at least your BMR for the day, you are good. As long as you eat at least that much, you don't have to eat your exercise calories back. So I think it might be easier for me to make sure I eat the calories I need to, and just work out and not worry about how many calories I burn during the work out. This way I will for sure be eating as much as I need to, and I can focus more on my workouts instead of habitually checking my heart rate monitor to see how many calories I've burned.

Does this seem like a good approach? This way I think my workout outs will be more efficient and I won't be obsessed about how many calories I've burned. I can just focus on my goals for my fitness.

CAS317

I too am not sure about the neg calories and calories from exercise equation and how to work them into the whole plan.

neanderthin

For me it's a bad approach. I generally eat enough to get stronger and set new goals in the gym. When I do this I generally look better in the mirror. I admit I can't maintain this philosophy day in and day out and I take a maintenance and gym break around the 8 week mark and then back at it...........my calorie consumption doesn't change.

CAS317

I too am not sure about the neg calories and calories from exercise equation and how to work them into the whole plan.

*net calories*

CassiHutchings

Bump

prokomds

When you set up your goals, you include your activity level. Looks like this:

How would you describe your normal daily activities?
Sedentary: Spend most of the day sitting (e.g. bank teller, desk job)
Lightly Active: Spend a good part of the day on your feet (e.g. teacher, salesman)
Active: Spend a good part of the day doing some physical activity (e.g. waitress, mailman)
Very Active: Spend most of the day doing heavy physical activity (e.g. bike messenger, carpenter)

If you include your weekly working out in this activity level, you don't need to log your exercise, and the number of calories MFP gives you already includes what you need to eat to cover your exercising (averaged out over the week). On the other hand, if you just set it to sedentary/lightly active to reflect your life when you're not exercising, you need to record your exercise and eat extra because of it.

That's the over-simplified version, but it works fairly well. The usual thing that's appropriate to link to is this:

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/654536-in-place-of-a-road-map-2-0-revised-7-2-12

That page does a great job of explaining how to set up your calories to have a reasonable (not extreme) calorie deficit. Good luck!