Worried about eating exercise calories

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cat6000
cat6000 Posts: 4 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
Does anyone else worry about gaining weight if you eat back all the calories you burn from exercise? I am a dancer and I have practice 5 days a week. Some days it is really intense and some days we spend a lot of time learning a new piece and not moving as much. It is not an exercise dance class so what we do in practice varies and the goal is not to get a good workout. If I just logged it as general dance I would be burning 273 calories an hour. Since I dance around 15 hours a week it adds up to a lot of extra calories. I'm worried that I might be overestimating what I burn and if I eat back all the calories I might actually start gaining weight. On the other hand I know if I don't eat back any I could be eating too little :( Does anyone have advice on how I should log this?

Replies

  • Mokey41
    Mokey41 Posts: 5,769 Member
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    Find a BMR calculator and find out what your BMR is. Those are the amount of calories you would need in a coma. Add a couple hundred to that so you are getting enough calories to feed your body. Eat that for a few weeks. If you see that you're losing weight too quickly (you shouldn't be losing more than 1% of your body weight per week for healthy weight loss) then you may need to add in a few more calories to offset your exercise. It's that simple. The numbers you get when you put your goals into MFP's calculator are just that, numbers. It does math, it doesn't tell you if it's a healthy number. That's where common sense and education on your part comes in.
  • Pebble321
    Pebble321 Posts: 6,554 Member
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    As dancing is part of your everyday activities, I suggest that you change your activity level setting to "active" or "very active".
    This allows more cals to account for your activity without having to log in x hours of exercise each day.
  • NaturallyOlivia
    NaturallyOlivia Posts: 496 Member
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    How did you come to the number of 273 cal per hour. If it was by MFP's calculationa let me caution tou, they tend to overestimate a lottttt. Additionally, i always try to avoid eating back exerciaw calories unless I am just abaolutely starving. In my opinion, if you're trying to lose weight, it defeats the purpose of exercising in the first place, and you're just chasing you tail. However, if the goal is weight maintenance, I say go right ahead!
  • cat6000
    cat6000 Posts: 4 Member
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    Thanks for the advice! I had my activity level set to sedentary since I am a student and spend a lot of time in class but I like the idea of raising it to active to accommodate for my exercise. 273 is the MFP calorie calculation and yeah it seems a bit high. Without being sure that I'm actually burning that much I don't want to eat back an extra 550 calories on days when I have practice.
  • Sambo004
    Sambo004 Posts: 549 Member
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    273 Calorie for an hour of dancing does not seem high at all! Dancing is serious exercise. I have been doing Insanity for the past 2.5 months and there, the workouts range from 40 - 65 mins and I burn an average of 350 - 610 calories. I know that it's intense cardio, but dancing is not easy either. Even when doing the 30 Day Shred (which is 28 mins of circuit training), calories burned are around 180 for 30 mins. I use a HRM and weigh 120 pounds, so my burns are lower now because I have reached my goal and am fitter.

    I tend not to eat all my exercise calories back, but usually aim for about half of them.

    I also found that when after getting my HRM and checking against MFP's calculators, there wasn't that big a difference. They were pretty close actually.

    Hope this helps :wink:

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