"Eating back" Exercise Calories - Simple breakdown

So on the days I do my long workouts (1000 calories) I need to make sure I do actually eat the 2490? That seems like a lot, but I have burned a lot so I guess that makes sense. What you are saying is only having a day with 490 net calories would cause this plateau? I'm all for eating more, lol!!

Have you seen the movie this year "The Avengers"? Chris Hemsworth ate almost 6000 calories a day to bulk up for this movie... not FATTEN up, pure muscle. It's all in the matter of what types of foods you eat... cheeseburger (no! no!), Chicken breast (Yes! Yes!)

I haven't seen a non PG movie in years thanks to 3 kids, but I get what you are saying. I guess I will up the calories for the next couple weeks and see what happens. I've been stuck for months!!

good idea....but be sure not to cheat and fill up that big calorie gap with pizza a donuts lol. i know its a way faster way to make up 1,000 calories but its not really good fuel for your body. up the intake of nutrient dense foods on those days, more protein and whole grain. your actual diet that works best varies from person to person based on DNA so its hard to tell you what to eat and not to eat. i had a dna test done for my wife and i to see exactly what diet and exercise routine helps us lose weight best, so unfortunately "avoid junk food" is as specific as it can get to apply to everybody lol

Well explained. I eat all of mine but go on weekly averages rather than daily so that I can eat more on the days I feel I need/want more rather than just on exercise days - as long as I stay within my weekly goal (more easily tracked on the phone app).

Not eating back just makes the job harder and doesn't necessarily increase your losses sufficiently to make it worth risking malnutrition - so why do it?

well said. its very important to listen to your body. if you're on a 1,200 daily goal and you feel like you literally have to starve yourself to hit that goal........your BMR was probably not calculated correctly or youre just trying to keep too big of a deficit for your BMR or something. nobody should feel starved to lose weight.

So on the days I do my long workouts (1000 calories) I need to make sure I do actually eat the 2490? That seems like a lot, but I have burned a lot so I guess that makes sense. What you are saying is only having a day with 490 net calories would cause this plateau? I'm all for eating more, lol!!

just thought of another good example of this. consider a vehicle with a full tank of gas, as you drive it the gas level goes down, the more you drive it the more room there is in the tank for more gas. Picture the tank being on full as your daily caloric goal and every time you eat youre putting gas in your tank, every time you exercise you're "driving around" burning gas. the more you drive around (exercise) the more room you have in your tank for more gas (calories). the more you drive around the more food you need to eat to make sure your tank is full at the end of the day

Marc thanks so much for this explanation mate. Makes it all much clearer. I have spent my bus ride to work working out my BMR and used the Harris Benedict Formula to work out my cals. Setting a deficit of 750 for just over a half kilo a week loss gets me to 1788. Readjusted my MFP settings in line with the HBF and got a goal of 1830. Very close!
How does the Fitbit adjustment fit in with all this? Can you really get full calorie credit for it, or isn't that activity level taken into account with the MFP and HBF activity settings anyway?

glad to help. would be hard to include fitbit in all this as i am suggesting not including your exercise regimen in your daily activity level (sedentary, lightly active, active, very active, etc). I only suggest including your job, home life, etc. if you are a call center rep that sits down 10 hours a day but you work out 6 days a week, i suggest setting your lifestyle as sedentary and just logging your exercise manually. if you work construction, then maybe your lifestyle is moderately active, still log your personal exercise regimen separately. the important thing is dont count the same activities twice. dont say you're "lightly active" because you have a sedentary job and you go jogging twice a week in the morning........just put it at sedentary and log your jog manually otherwise the jog is calculated into your lifestyle AND you are logging it a second time manually. also make sure you arent just deducting your daily deficit goal from your BMR, be sure to calculate your lifestyle type also. for a sedentary lifestyle add about 20% calories to your BMR and then subtract your 1,000 or 500 calorie deficit. the list of lifestyle activity percentages are on this thread somewhere.

i dont use the hbf i use the miflin st jeor equation. theres a post somewhere on this thread where that formula is listed. the hbf lists my bmr as 3300 calories and my daily burn at almost 4,000 calories! the st jeor equation lists my bmr at about 2750 and my daily burn at 3300, so you can see theres a big difference. my body seems to feel right getting to 2300 for a 1,000 calorie deficit, and sometimes even 2300 can be a challenge to reach without eating junk food so i question the HBF accuracy, it WAYYYY overestimates what i need to keep going.

Thanks mate!

no problem. all feel free to friend me also......sometimes i suck at following my own advice. You know how parents sometimes say "do as a i say, not as i do"? haha. sometimes i have my lazy days where i just dont feel like cooking and end up 500 short on my calories. unfortunately as humans.....knowing what you SHOULD do doesnt always necessarily mean you do it haha.

on the days where you do 1,000 calories in exercise or something crazy like that, you will probably have to sneak snacks in and maybe an extra meal.........try not to sit down and eat a 1900 calorie dinner lol. if you get within a few hundred calories of your day goal and youre just too full to wrap it up i wouldnt worry about it. its more of a rule of consistency and flexibility not an iron fist. being a few hundred calories short on one day isnt going to hurt you. being hundreds of calories short every day for weeks or months on end could hurt you. i have plenty of days where i dont get all the way to my 2300, but i know if i do it too much it can come back and bite me. as you get healthier and exercise more your appetite should start to go up. so regularly having 1,000 calorie-burn workouts should cause an increase in appetite.

Thanks for the topic! I just want to make sure that I have this reasonably straight. I'm working more towards getting in shape then I am necessarily about losing weight, though I'm certainly trying to do that too. I have my caloric goals set at 1300 but I exercise 6 days a week with 3 being about an hour and 3 being closer to 2. My burn for the shorter days is close to 1000 where as my longer days are probably closer to 1600.

Especially on the bigger burn days I have a hard time eating to my calorie count, I get close, sometimes I get there and sometimes over (if bad food entices me). Should I be concerned about that, I'd be having a terribly hard time trying to feed myself almost 3000 calories without resorting to fast food. My lighters days/day off tend to let me hit the mark or go slightly over.

Is there anything I should be attempting to adjust? I've not been on a big decline, but it's moving in the right direction, though this week I added running so that's kind of kept me on a weight balance as my legs are definitely feeling the extra burn. Thanks!

first, id have to question your 1300 calorie goal. this seems VERY low for most guys. posted in this thread somewhere is the equation to get your proper goal.
1) your lifestyle setting (sedentary, lightly active, etc) should be set to what your life is like without your exercise regimen.
2) you need to be hitting your caloric net goal for the day including food you eat AND exercise. so if your goal is 1500 and you do 1,000 calorie burn workout, thats now 2500 calories to eat. shouldnt be an issue if you start early in the day.

next, to keep it in perspective, 350 calories is a tenth of a pound.....so if you go over by 100 calories its literally less than a third of a tenth of a pound..........so no need to feel really bad about that. and i know how hard eating 3,000 calories a day can be, i only have to do a 700 calorie workout to need it, my goal is 2300 a day. the trick for me is to know in advance at the beginning of the day that its going to be a big day for exercise. this way i can start the trend to a big caloric intake early. a big breakfast a good sized snack and a large lunch usually can knock out a large amount of calories, plenty of snacks throughout the day, eating an early enough dinner allows time afterwards for a small snack before it gets too terribly late. and like ive said in previous posts, under-eating a few times here and there wont really hurt you, doing it consistently is what will catch up with you