feel stupid..but why eat your workout calories?

I eat back half or more of my exercise calories. Some days I eat none of them back, I'm not worried about having too much of a deficit because I'm still very big and have around 50 percent body fat, so yeah.....buuuut, one of the main reasons I exercise is to have more calories to eat! Eating is great.

If your calorie goal is 1200 or 1300 though, you should probably eat back some of your exercise calories for the day unless you want to have a net of 700.

I eat back half or more of my exercise calories. Some days I eat none of them back, I'm not worried about having too much of a deficit because I'm still very big and have around 50 percent body fat, so yeah.....buuuut, one of the main reasons I exercise is to have more calories to eat! Eating is great.

If your calorie goal is 1200 or 1300 though, you should probably eat back some of your exercise calories for the day unless you want to have a net of 700.

I am kinda the same, but I don't use the calorie goal that MFP gave me. I am doing 1900 now, and not eating most of my exercise calories. The 1900 goal gives me a deficit of 600/day, and my burns are usually around 200-400. This is why "eating back" is so controversial because it really depends on your calorie goal to begin with. MFP wanted me at 1200. That's a calorie goal for the birds, in my opinion. :smokin:

Personally I won't go to lengths to eat my exercise cals. I eat them if I'm hungry, but I still wouldn't just not eat them at all because otherwise strength training would be a waste of time.

I just posted this on my blog the day before yesterday... it explains why I advocate eating them back. People seemed to like it:

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/blog/mrsbigmack/view/finding-the-sweet-spot-452184

Just as a side note... from April to August, I lost 20 lbs with only a 290 calorie average daily deficit. Of those 20 lbs, 4.6 lbs of it were lean mass. It would have been way more if I'd had huge deficits.

I used to do this crazy thing where I would just eat the min 1200 calories per day and work out like crazy. It was very difficult and bad for my body - I messed up my metabolism, I had it a few times where I would skip my period and I put myself through torture that was very unnecessary. I would stay on my weight for a long time or even gain weight because my body was trying to hold on to everything as much as possible.

Now it´s a lot healthier and easier to maintain - better to make a change of life style than some crazy diet that feels like torture and slows down your metabolism (and will probably yo-yo back).

So yes, I do eat (or drink) some of the workout calories back - depending on what I did that day and how I feel.

HOWEVER - I just recently read about gross and net calories burned - so I guess it is VERY important to calculate this correctly. Because if you add your workout as ¨gross¨ instead of ¨net¨ then you will overestimate how many calories you actually burn - eating those calories back would not help you much with your weight loss.

Here is a really good article about the difference:
http://www.shapesense.com/fitness-exercise/articles/net-versus-gross-calorie-burn.aspx

And here is a calculator that will tell you how much of your gross calories (what it will tell you on the running machine at the gym for instant) are actually net calories (the ones you can eat back).
http://www.shapesense.com/fitness-exercise/calculators/net-versus-gross-calorie-burn-conversion-calculator.aspx

Hope this helps!

Working out doesn't build muscle if you're eating at a calorie deficit and your metabolism is a genetic thing not something you can reset by increasing or decreasing your workouts or food.

Your metabolism definitely changes over time in response to a deficit OR surplus.

(yes you can plateau and not gain while in a heavy surplus, especially after you've been at it a while, the same phenomenon people who have been losing a while experience, switch the direction of your surplus/deficit and you'll reverse the metabolic adaptation)

Same here, it doesn't make sense to eat them.

Balance in all things. Eat PART OF your exercise calories back but not all.. Here is why.

1. MFP already figures a deficit for your desired weight loss so by not eating part of that back you will actually have a higher than recommended deficit. Exercise requires fuel and food is fuel. More is not always better so dropping too low may actually work against you in the long term.

2, HOWEVER, I do NOT recommend eating ALL the exercise calories back... This is because we tend to underestimate what we eat and over estimate our exercise benefit. I like to err on the side of caution (generally)... Has worked for me.

Best wishes on your journey.

I agree with this. I generally eat within 100 cals of goal as a buffer.

I would suggest using an online calculator (not MFP) to figure up your TDEE and stick to that. If you do that it takes into account your activity level which means no eating back calories.

If I use the formula to dtermine my TDEE I get about 2050. If I set up MFP to set my goal to gain one lb a week it gives me about the same number. That is not right at all. I trust the TDEE formula much more than MFP for calorie goals. there is no way I could gain a pound a week at 2050 calories a day.