Do you eat back your exercise calories?

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  • fionarama
    fionarama Posts: 788 Member
    I ignore exercise calories so the exercise log is just to track time spent exercising for me. Exercise calories are highly over rated. You can't exercise away eating too much food. I learned this the hard way most of my life running marathon after marathon (and lifting) and not being able to lose weight and in fact continued to gain year after year. And I don't pig out, binge, snack mindlessly, eat out of boredom, etc, but the portion sizes are too big for a small person like me. (Well I wasn't small when I weighed over 170 lbs at 51'0"!)

    Anyway I found what worked for me was separating out the two things:

    Eat less to lose weight
    Exercise to maintain or build lean body mass
    end of story.

    I found just ignoring all the complicated stuff everyone throws at us is the key. Day in and day out focus on two things. Eat lless, move more, stay within calorie budget (either weekly or daily). You can eat low one day and high the next, whatever you want. Well, it did work for me. I am the fittest, leanest, strongest, and most muscular I've ever been in my life at age 51 and I'm healthy and don't get sick and have long endurance.

    If you have a lot of body fat reserves you would be surprised at how little you can eat (unless you have emotional eating issues or disorders). The leaner you get the less your body has to draw from and then you have to taper up your calories. There is no such thing as starvation mode for women over 12% body fat or men over 6% body fat. I am a living breathing example of that. I went from obese to now under 12% BF and I've maintained for one year and built muscle the whole time. You don't BUILD muscle in starvation mode, so I proved everyone wrong.


    This is all the answer you ever need. If I look at actual calories no, I don't eat them back - if I do I seem to go into more of a maintenance mode. I eat what I feel I need, I eat clean, I don't drink alcohol (a big one) and I exercise daily. If I want to lose weight I do more cardio. As much as I can.
    It simply is eat right exercise more there are no complicated ways about it. To me if you are plateauing and you feel your calories and food are right, you certainly don't need to eat more, you need to train harder and longer. It will always work. There is no magic cure to fat, its all hard work all the way and much harder work the lower your body weight becomes.
  • faithchange
    faithchange Posts: 311 Member
    if I ate them i'd probably spend my evenings throwing up from being sick from too much food. I can't eat that much. i barely reach 1000.

    Then you should really think about adding more healthy fats and such to your diet. Your body needs energy!

    Amen! That's what gets me when people say they can barely eat their 1000 or 1200 calories. What about almonds, cashews, avocados, ect. These have over 100 calories and are healthy....have some oatmeal...DANG....
  • Elen_Sia
    Elen_Sia Posts: 638 Member
    Simple answer: Yes.
  • dap1217
    dap1217 Posts: 26 Member
    bump
  • arcticfox04
    arcticfox04 Posts: 1,011 Member
    I eat about 50-70% back on average. Normally when I'm good on protein I stop.
  • goldilocks509
    goldilocks509 Posts: 76 Member
    meaning you wont be able to gain muscle as easily?
    I always did. Well, now I'm not, because I'm including my exercise into my calorie goal, but either way, I'm eating 1800-2000 calories a day.

    You'll lose weight eating just 1200. But you probably won't get the body composition you like that way.
  • psuLemon
    psuLemon Posts: 38,431 MFP Moderator
    meaning you wont be able to gain muscle as easily?
    I always did. Well, now I'm not, because I'm including my exercise into my calorie goal, but either way, I'm eating 1800-2000 calories a day.

    You'll lose weight eating just 1200. But you probably won't get the body composition you like that way.

    I believe they mean if they eat 1200 calories they wont maintain their muscle. So they will lose both muscle and fat. And the closer to a healthy weight, the greater the chances are to lose more muscle. If you eat 20% below tdee and heavy weight train, you can easily cut fat and maintain lbm. Now if you want to gain muscle, then you need to eat at a caloric surplus in order to create an anabolic environment.

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