Calories and Exercise... Part Deux

So this is a good question, and it's not a simple yes or no answer. It really depends on a lot of things.

I'll try to break it down for you.

First thing to remember about exercise calories is (and this is MEGA important) you're going to get a lot of confusing advice about exercise calories. The thing to understand is that most people (unlike myself who's coming at this from a neutral, personal trainer perspective) are going to give you what worked for them. And that's great, but it's anecdotal and not very useful to you as you aren't in THEIR situation. So if someone starts their answer with "I didn't" or "What I did was..." or "when I first started I..." Be cautious. I'm not saying don't listen, but just be aware that they are giving your their own experience, which may or may not fit with your situation. It's great to share your experience with someone, but unless they are in a VERY similar situation, applying your technique to fix someone else's situation isn't really that helpful. It's like one person having a broken down car on the side of the road and someone else coming up to them and saying, "when my car broke down, I replaced the flat tire, and then it was fine." Well this is great if a flat tire is the issue, but what if it's a broken fuel pump? See my point? I'm not trying to be a bummer to everyone offering up their situations, that's not my point, my point is, what works for one person, doesn't really work for everyone else.


That said, I'm looking at your profile Bleux, and I can give you the following points to take into account.

1) you have about 25 lbs to lose, that's not a giant amount, so you probably don't have a really high available body fat amount to draw from.
See, the reason why some people can get away with not eating their exercise calories and still safely lose weight is two fold. Firstly, they probably are obese and have a high percentage of readily available body fat to draw from, when this is the case, the body won't immediately recognize the extreme deficit and simply will draw energy from the available fat (after all that's what it's there for). And Second, genetically, some people are predisposed to more easily burn body fat, this contributes to the first part, limiting the body's exposure to extreme deficits.
2) Once you start losing weight, or if your available body fat isn't extremely high to begin with, your body just can't pull enough fat fast enough from your fat stores to compensate for massive calorie deficits that not eating exercise calories will create. This means that over the course of days or weeks, your body will start to recognize a deficit, and will start to slow down metabolic processes. And that huge deficit you thought you had is no longer huge. Also the body (in conjunction with slowing down your metabolism) will start to canabalize available muscle and bone energy (protein), this makes you weaker and actually can CONTRIBUTE to a higher body fat %.

In your situation, I would recommend starting out eating all of your exercise calories, and spreading them out over the course of the day. Here's the thing, you don't NEED to do 1000 calories a day of exercise, that's over and above, and can very easily lead to burn out if you aren't careful. Exercising 3 times a day is a lot, it's more than I do and I'm a trainer, so don't feel like that's the only way to do this. Heck when I was losing my 55 lbs, I did it by exercising 40 minutes a day, burning 300 to 600 calories a day. THE MAIN CONCEPT IS EATING RIGHT!!!!!!! I can't state this enough, exercise is NOT how you will lose the weight, it's eating correctly that will do it. Exercise is a catalyst and will help, but it's all for naught if you don't eat correctly. Focus on changing how you eat and you will lose the weight!