calories burnt

If you are new to working out, which I presume by your question you are, the answer is yes. Eat your calories that you are allotted. BUT.....eat good foods.

As time goes on, and you learn your body, you will learn when and what you can cut. For now, set your goal at about 1 to 1.5 pounds per week and eat the calories you are allowed to eat. If you don't, you will see big initial loss but your body will go in to starvation mode and LOCK YOU UP. In other words, your calorie intake will be so low that when (not if) you plateau you will leave yourself nowhere to go to cut calories to restart the loss. This is bad bad.

More importantly, verify your calorie burn via a good Heart Rate monitor (I strongly recommend TIMEX) and a secondary site that uses a calculation based on Age/HR/Time/Weight. This is very important. If you over estimate your exercise burn you will think you have more calories available than what you do which will hose you.

Mark

I usually eat part of them. Unless you are using a heart rate monitor or bodybugg/fitbit so you know exactly how many calories each exercise is burning, then it's all an estimate. So, I generally eat 40-50% of them and leave the rest as a cushion against errors.

I actually have been working out for a good couple of years now. I trained and ran my first 1/2 marathon last year. The thing is, I have never been a great eater. I have wrote down calorie intake before but not like this. What do you recomend for good foods? Like I said, NOT good at this at all!!

Oops on me re. your newness.

Tuna, ground turkey (sub for ground beef), Chicken breast, white fish and steak. I eat baked potatoes (No butter, no salt, no sour cream), brown rice occasionally and all the green veggies you can stuff in your face. Pink grapefruit, almonds, apples and bananas occasionally. Light string cheese is good as well. Yogurts and crap like that is kind of empty. You eat it but you are hungry 20 min later so I save the cals for other things.

Now, my cal out is 1200 to 1600 a day on 6 days a week. Combine that with a recommended intake of 1800 and yeah, I always feel like I am eating. But, for me, I feel that listening to yourself can be a bit of a trap. I have felt great only to hit a wall HARD a day or two after I had a huge deficient. But hey, whatever works for you because we are all different.