Why do people say to eat back the calories just burned?

Use your diet to achieve caloric deficit and exercise for fitness/health. If you're already in deficit with your diet you don't need additional deficit with exercise, hence "eat them back". This only works if you're accurately, as possible, tracking your caloric expenditure.

It is very confusing I know. I am not currently eating back my calories, but I am losing weight. When I do eat back my calories, I gain. It's tough to know the right thing to do when so many advise you to "eat more to lose more".

If you are trying to lose fat, then yea it defeats the purpose. I don't even count my exercise calories.

It is very confusing I know. I am not currently eating back my calories, but I am losing weight. When I do eat back my calories, I gain. It's tough to know the right thing to do when so many advise you to "eat more to lose more".

If MFP allots me 1750 calories...then I try to net 1750. So if I workout and burn 1000 calories, I try to eat around 2750 that day, so that I end up with a net of 1750.

ETA: The two most valuable equipment items (re: fitness/weightloss) are my heart rate monitor and my digital food scale. They help me get a more accurate idea of intake and burn.

A lot of people say they eat 60-75% of their exercise calories back, to allow for miscalculations and slightly increase their deficit while ensuring they get the food their body needs. If you don't want to eat them all, you could try eating a portion of them and see if that works for you hunger-wise.

when you burn calories people say to eat them back? why? doesn't that defeat the whole objective..

I can not see the amount of cals that MFP has calculated based on what you have put into the calculator.

But let me give you an example.

If it is the BMR of 1200 cals a day and you are exercising and burning 500 cals a day. Then your net calories are 700 so you would be undereating.

If your cals on MFP are 2000 and you exercise and burn 500 cals then you would net 1500 cals so you are good to go, if you do not want to eat your exercise calories

So white rice is not good huh,guess I missed that memo as I had 500grams uncooked weight of it today,no wonder I'm in such an awful state

I don't know why people say to eat back calories. In some cases it is very good advice and in others not so much. It's not a one size fits all rule. If you are morbidly obese it really isn't important at all to eat back your calories. You will already be eating an adequate amount if you are following the MFP calorie allotment. It could be upwards to 3000 a day, depending on how obese and your activity level, I am sure there are outliers that have a higher requirement then even that. So, if you have 3000 calories to play with and you exercise an additional 1000 calorie deficit to bring your total deficit to 1500 for the day, it's really ok to lose that 3 pounds a week. It is likely to be a lower loss than that though since the calorie allotment could be a titch high and the calorie burn estimate a titch low. And a lot of people under count calories by a titch as well. That is a lot of titches and it can add up to 500 calories easily.

But on the other hand if you have less than 30 pounds to lose you should be set to lose less than a pound a week and it's very likely you won't be eating more than 2000 calories unless you are very very active. In that case you should eat a good percentage back. You would have to play around and see what works. If you don't eat enough you can stall if you eat a bit too much or don't exercise enough you can stall. I am sure it is maddening. But, what you don't want to play around and do is create a 1500 calorie deficit, that is just begging for trouble even though losing weight at that rate is very attractive. It's just not sustainable and you haven't really figured out a healthy lifestyle, you've just figured out how to starve yourself, congrats I guess.

So, to make a long answer short, if you are obese don't worry about eating them all back or even worry if you don't eat any back. If you are close to goal 30 lbs or less to lose then absolutely eat all or most back, when you have figured out exactly what your TDEE is and what you need to do to lose a half to one pound a week.

Abs are made in the kitchen not the gym. You lose weight in the kitchen and get fit in the gym. 70% what you eat and 30% workout, you cannot out exercise a bad diet.
Food can be viewed in two ways: good or bad.... Fuel your body by eating clean and stop "feeding" your body with junk food. Your body NEEDS carbs to give you energy to workout but there are the good complex carbs (whole grains, brown rice, rice flour ) and the baddd carbs (chips, cheetos, doughnuts, white bread/rice..). As they say, you are what you eat....if you eat clean you will lose weight and keep it off, be full of energy and feeling great. If you what crap....well, you will feel like crap

Msg me and we can chat more about the importance of clean eating!

Subjective. You don't have to eat clean to achieve energy nor feel great. If I am what I eat, then I must be Ronald McDonald and the Taco Bell chihuahua rolled into one.

A.C.E. Certified Personal/Group FitnessTrainer
IDEA Fitness member
Kickboxing Certified Instructor
Been in fitness for 30 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

Nicely said.

because MFP sets a caloric goal for you, assuming that you aren't exercising- only cutting calories. This is to be the bare minimum calories consumed. If you burn calories through exercise, you have now dipped below that and must eat them back to reach your NET calorie goal.

As said before it depends on how much you burn when exercising, I don't exercise that much due to my back problems so find it better for me if I don't log my exercise. I was hit by a drunk driver 3 years go and not being able to work or exercise like I did before I just piled the weight on. but it's coming of slowly I have tried both ways and it's what works for me.

because that's how MFP is designed to work. did you read anything when you signed up? didn't think so.