Do you eat calories earned from exercise?

katiepegasus

For a while I've been eating my daily 1200 calories plus the calories I've earned from exercise. It worked at first and I lost some weight, but when I started doing Zumba (burning 500 calories) I would add that many calories and I started gaining.

So now I'm trying to decide if I should even add exercise calories. What do you do?

Live4theLift

When I exercise I never even put it in MFP anymore.

red8424

I don't make it an effort to eat them back per se, but I do take advantage every once in a while when I am truly hungry. Kind of like my "overflow" calories and macros. MFP wants you to eat them back but I think it's all personal preference or school of thought.

HollisGrant

I eat some of them back, but not all. I understand the principle, that if you don't eat enough your body will think you are starving, hold onto the weight, and it will be harder to lose. I'm just not hungry enough to eat them all back -- I usually feel completely full.

Broejen

You will not gain fat by eating 1200 calories a day! When you start eating the amount of calories you should (figure out your BMR & TDEE!) you might gain initially because your body is thinking this is a one time thing and it has to hoard it, but it will settle down, just give it time!

Yes, I eat back my exercise calories. Otherwise, I net below my BMR and that isn't good!

melindasuefritz

I eat some of them back, but not all

green_2

I'm still deciding whether to add my exercise to MFP. To be honest in the past I used to exercise quite a bit (before I fell off the trying to be healthy wagon) and then took whatever the calories the machine told me and added that in my calculations of how much I should be losing (and I was eating some of it too). What I did find is that I wasn't losing like I expected, now it maybe because of muscle mass but after doing some research a lot of the exercise machines are giving "ideal" readings. So if it said I exercised 500 calories away, really it was probably more like 300. :-/ I guess the issue for me is that exercise was really hard to quantify precisely. I would say don't eat those exercised calories but make sure to eat enough such that you don't put your body in hoarding mode. Right now I am not exercising (bad I know but my health doesn't allow me to move much right now), the most exercise I get is playing piano but for me I want to see if focusing on food first will give me the initial encouragement. Once my knees/ankles can handle my weight I will try walking again but for now I want to see if eating healthy will get me in a good enough shape to even exercise.