Should I REALLY eat my exercise calories back?

I don't eat them all back either. In fact I find it difficult to eat them all back.

You're using MFP to allocate and track your calories that are burned and consumed in order to maintain a healthy deficit.

Or you're not, you're just randomly burning and eating a figure you're making up on a daily basis, and going through the rigour of logging everything just out of curiosity.

I guess what you mean IronSmasher is that you are advising the original poster to use MFP to track their calories consumed in a day, including activities and consuming up to them in order to maintain a healthy deficit; which has already been factored into the MFP calculation which was calculated for you when you first created your profile.

Is that what you mean?

I guess what you mean IronSmasher is that you are advising the original poster to use MFP to track their calories consumed in a day, including activities and consuming up to them in order to maintain a healthy deficit; which has already been factored into the MFP calculation which was calculated for you when you first created your profile.

Is that what you mean?

I think so. Unfortunately, what will follow, is hordes of people applying methods from other diets and calculators that do not use the same methods as MFP, and instead add calories to account for the exercise in the original calories allowance. What's best (and this is really special), some KNOW they are using a different method, but forget to mention that they're not using MFP as intended, and have actually manually changed their calorie settings.

You don't have to eat your exercise calories back and sometimes eating back your calories can be counter productive. The more exercise you do, the larger your deficit. No paper, diet, or journal has ever said you must eat your exercise calories back. That's a MyFitnessPal myth. If there is a journal paper that says you must eat your exercise calories back, I'd be open minded to read it.


Edit, You should be still losing even if you eat your calories back but you don't have too.

I agree with this honestly. On days I work out (3 or 4 times a week, rigorous cardio) I'm hungrier but not hungry enough to eat back EVERYTHING I burned. Maybe half.

depends on if your goals are set up with exercise included or not.

and how your body feels. if you don't feel you need to eat them, don't. if you do - do...

MFP tells me that my net calorie intake is 1620 and that as this is my net, I can eat my calories from exercise back.

Can anyone with experience reassure me that it's ok to do this?

I don't always eat every single one back, but I'm often still hungry/hungrier from working out so I often eat some back.

Thanks :-)

MFP as designed expects you to eat your calories back because the calorie deficit is built in BEFORE exercise. When you exercise you increase the deficit MFP gave you. When the deficit is too large you will burn fat AND muscle. One of the reasons people workout is to KEEP muscle.

Now, the problem(s) with this ..... calorie burns can be inflated .... machine & MFP are often too high. Some people have their activity level set too high ... this means that they are alread accounting for some of their exercise calories.

So, a suggestion would be to eat back a percentage of exercise calories ... if you stop losing weight ... you are eating too much. If you feel fatigued and run down ... you are eating too little.

Excellent answer!! I've been getting my calorie burns from a Polar F6 then Polar FT4 heart rate monitor (HRM) since I started back in January 2010 and most of the time I eat all of them back. As you can see, I've lost almost 90 pounds to date. Don't pay too much attention to how long it's taken me - about 60 pounds came off the first year and I've fallen off the wagon a few times and not been in much of a rush since then.

If you use the calorie burns from cardio machines or MFP calculations aim to eat back half to 2/3rds of the calories back. Don't force yourself or fill the calories with junk just to get to a certain number, instead try to pre-plan by keeping snacks on hand and/or by eating a slightly larger breakfast (lunch or dinner) on the days you work out.

I don't think you "have" to eat your calories back; unless your Net is under 1200. 1200 calories a day intake is not just MFP's recommendation, it is widely accepted as the minimum caloric intake that your body needs to function correctly.

"According to the Mayo Clinic, you do not want to lose more than one to two pounds per week, which means a safe calorie deficit would be to burn 500 to 1,000 calories per day through a reduced calorie diet AND exercise."

Source: http://www.fitsugar.com/Why-1200-Calories-Day-Important-When-Dieting-13080864

I don't. No matter how much exercise I do and how many calories I burn I try to eat the allotted calories that I have set for myself -- not the NET calories - period. If I go over on exercise days it's no big deal. On a night that I'm going out and I know I'm going to indulge I consider the exercise calories a "buffer" so that if I go over it's not as big a deal as it would be if I didn't exercise.

Weight loss is about calories in vs. calories out. So if you eat back all of those calories you will not lose as much weight or at least not lose it as quickly as you would have if you hadn't eaten those calories.

Please dont simplfy the answer that much....if people were to listen to this logic they would create huge defecits that would end up slowing down their metabolism and hurt them in the end. If I were eating 2500 calories a day, then exercising so much per day that I burned 2000-2500 a day (crazy I know but proving a point) then I would be at 0 Net and my body after a week would collapse. It is not simply calorie in vs calorie out in terms of weight loss.

The fact is you want to maintain a healthy defecit. This is the reason you eat back your exercise calories...because the defecit is ALREADY built in to your daily calories here on MFP.

If you were to go by TDEE...that is a different story, but MFP calculates your 1 pound loss a week defecit for you. Make all numbers hit 0 or as close as you can....its that simple.