Stupid Exercise Calories (yeah I said it)

I had my first experience with this today.. could NOT eat all my exercise calories. I went over like 340 yesterday so I think that might be it. So forced myself to eat all except 300ish for my overage yesterday.

Eating without being hungry has always been a problem for me so it seems counter productive to force it down. But! I still want to loose weight so I'd better... wait? what?! :laugh:

Are you consistently losing weight eating all of your exercise calories?

You don't have to eat all of your exercise calories. It's not the golden rule and doesn't work for everyone. Don't force feed yourself if you're not hungry. Try eating a quarter or half and see how that works.

I consistently lose weight without eating them all back. I eat some of them back but certainly not all. Thinking that eating them back would be counterproductive is not really accurate since MFP puts you at a deficit to begin with and eating them back keeps you at the same calorie deficit (exercise increases your metabolism so you can eat more anyway...and you NEED those extra calories to fuel your body to actually perform the exercise efficiently without breaking down your muscle tissue). But you don't need to eat every last one of them. I burn between 600-800 calories when I workout which makes my goal go up from 1210 to around 1910. But, I normally eat around 1500 or so. After lots of trial and error, this is just what I have found that works for me. I am not stuffing myself when I am not really hungry, and I am also not starving myself either (meaning I have no hunger pains ever, and I don't have the fatigue and moodiness that under-eating dieters have). And I have been losing around 1 pound per week.

MFP is a really helpful site, but we all need to remember our bodies do not actually have a calorie timer on them that resets at midnight every night. It's not as if when you're over on a particularly day it switches into storage mode, and when you're under by a significant amount it switches into starvation mode... these things happen over a larger span of time. You could eat back some of those calories throughout the rest of your week. When I was trying to lose weight I was rarely eating back my calories, but at the same time I never felt fatigue, irritability or misery over what I was eating. Sure I wanted cake, and cookies, and chips if they were sitting out. But I didn't feel hungry all the time without them either.

If you want to eat your calories though - peanut butter is the way to do it.

MFP is a really helpful site, but we all need to remember our bodies do not actually have a calorie timer on them that resets at midnight every night. It's not as if when you're over on a particularly day it switches into storage mode, and when you're under by a significant amount it switches into starvation mode... these things happen over a larger span of time. You could eat back some of those calories throughout the rest of your week. When I was trying to lose weight I was rarely eating back my calories, but at the same time I never felt fatigue, irritability or misery over what I was eating. Sure I wanted cake, and cookies, and chips if they were sitting out. But I didn't feel hungry all the time without them either.

If you want to eat your calories though - peanut butter is the way to do it.

Great way to say it. We all(including myself) look at it as a 24 hour period. When in reality it's not. I just started to change to a 350 calories every 3 hours instead of 24 hours total

I think for starters you're drastically under-estimating what you should be eating a day with that kind of activity level but I'd need more information like age/weight/height to find out. Also length of time working out and intensity of those workouts to get a better understanding.

I am always SO surprised to hear that you guys are having trouble eating back your exercise calories. I mean... aren't you HUNGRY?! It almost makes me think that your body isn't sending out accurate signals anymore.

for me there seems to be only one good solution to this:

either eat more OR exercise less. Maybe you're totally freaking out your body by exercising like crazy!? This should be doable!

Also, in looking at your diary - you need to eat breakfast! More than just juice!

But you seemed to have no problem reaching your goals the last few days - in fact you were even over your calories... hmmm confused.

Am I approaching this all wrong? I am set a level of 1650 calories a day, then I exercise to burn 500 5 times a week. Should I then be eating the extras I burn? I have been using them as a cushion in case I go a little over my 1650... Also how long is it before I start to see a weight loss? I am going to stick at it, but I wanna see results!!!

It's a bad cushion because it almost doubles your weekly deficit (If you've set it to 1 pound a week) and makes you lose fast enough to increase muscle loss. You need to eat those exercise calories to fuel your exercise.

@frostyisisy
I took a look at your diary an for the last week or so, you've been doing fine. If what you logged before that is accurate, you have been VERY low and you might even see some weight gain before your metabolism "resets" and you'll begin seeing the scales move down. If after three weeks or so, you are still stalling, you should check your exercise calories. At least for me, MFP often overestimates them and it seems that the energy that you burn just by existing, isn't subtracted from those numbers, so if I burn about 1800 Kcal a day just by exiting and ran for an hour, I would need to subtract 1800/24=75 Kcal from whatever an HRM or some site estimates give.

I think it was yesterday when you logged 55 minutes of "Judo, Taekwondo, etc". Was that the length of the training session?
When I logged my Taekwondo training using the lenght of the sesssion (usually 90 minutes) I ended up overestimating because, lets face it, your heart rate doesn't stay at 170 all that time..

The exercise calories can be a great bother! You can't live without them but figuring them out requires a lot of guesswork.. Unless you have money to get one of those fancy HRM's that just tell you what you burned..
Fortunately though, everything get's a lot easier when you get them figured out! :flowerforyou:

If yo're not hungry don't eat. Simple.

you can try adding fruits in your mix. drinking some calories (milk). Peanut butter is a good tip. I put avocado on my sandwiches and mix w/ my dinner (chicken burritos...yum!). Also almonds, cashews, etc.

all high cal but good for you. HTH a little.

i was stalled w/ my weight loss until I started eating pretty much all of my exercise calories back; then i started to lose again.

good luck!

The goal isn't necessarily to zero out your net calorie intake, ya know. If I only eat 1200 cals (and my intake goal is 1200) and exercise 300 cals off... then I'm +300 in my net. which is GOOD. You don't want to ADD another 300 cals of food to make sure it all comes out to 0. Being in the positive of net cals is good. Negative is bad. You keep balancing it out, and you won't get anywhere. You won't gain weight, nor will you lose weight. It's like a stalemate.

No, remember that your 1200 calories is already -500 to lose!

I'll use me as an example:

I need 1700 per day to stay at my same weight
1700-500=1200 (goal per day)
1200-600 burned exercise calories= 600 calories! If I don't eat those 600 back I would only be giving my body 600 calories per day.
Not a good idea. Thin and healthy are not the same thing.


Edit: As I read more I see this was already explained...sorry to be redundant

I think you should add in more snacks and add a little more calories to each meal. Eat peanut butter with apple slices instead of just the apple. Add cheese to broccoli, whole wheat toast and egg for breakfast, shrimp to a salad, avocado to sandwich and or salad, ect. You can also add milk to meals if you need a bit extra. The cheese and other little extras do add up quick!

I feel the same way. And mine is only about 1700 with the exercise cals. I have a hard time eating more than 1500. Not mentally making myself eat it, but physically: my stomach just isn't that big anymore. Unless I ate total crap loaded with fat and sugar, I just can't get that many cals.

Produce just isn't high calorie and most of the things I'm eating aren't either: high fiber soups and cereals and lowfat protein: none of it is very cal-heavy. I end up eating like 2 servings of random snacky things (sesame rice crackers and triscuits, that kind of thing) just to get CLOSE to where it says I should be.

I just ate lunch: a cup of white bean chicken chili, 6 trsicuits and a yellow bell pepper and I feel like I just had Thanksgiving dinner. I'm stuffed. And it was less than 350 cals.

You can eat calorie dense foods that are still healthy such as nuts, avocados, etc......You won't be consuming as much food, but more calories.

HTH,
Erin