exercise calories...

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kate205gti
kate205gti Posts: 84 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
not the usual question lol :p but related!
if i do an hour at the gym and my HRM says I've burnt 300 calories, do I log/eat back all 300? or do I deduct the 70 calories I would have burned anyway had I done nothing and log/eat back only 230 calories?
any ideas please? :)

Replies

  • jrueckert
    jrueckert Posts: 355 Member
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    Well you've burned calories, so in order to hit your calorie goal for the day, you'll have to consume more. If you eat 1200 calories in a day, then burn 300, you've really only had 900 calories for that day. So it's up to you if you want to fill those calories, but they are subtracted from what you've consumed.
  • Samana06
    Samana06 Posts: 107
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    I would just eat back the 230 ... but that's just ME ... listen to your body!
  • vballer21
    vballer21 Posts: 37
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    The website already creates a deficit in your calories for each day...so if you burn extra calories by exercising you should eat them. If you don't the deficit will be larger than it should be and your body could go into starvation mode.
  • amyfritz
    amyfritz Posts: 33
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    I personally only eat half my calories, since I am not 100% sure that my calories burned are accurate. So I would go with the 230 or a little less.
  • rileysowner
    rileysowner Posts: 8,239 Member
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    I don't eat any back because I know without something much more advanced than my HRM is needed for an accurate measure of calories. All my reading about "starvation mode" seems to point out that 1) It is not something your body goes into that easily especially if you use resistance training 2) To get into it you would have to eat very low calories for an extended period of time. At this point based on what I read and my own thinking on how a body would/should work I question the whole starvation mode thing completely. If you body is evolved (assuming you hold to that view of human development) to survive and puts on fat to survive through the lean times, and you have evolved as a hunter gatherer who cannot depend on regular meals but needs your muscle to hunt down and capture the next one, why would such evolution consume muscle (needed for survival) before fat (specifically stored to survive times of lack of food) That makes no sense at all. I am still not sure on it, but I am leaning away from "starvation mode" except in very specific situations.

    If you want to eat back your calories I would only eat those you would not have burned anyway, so subtract the BMR calories for the time you worked out.
  • schobert101
    schobert101 Posts: 218 Member
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    I'm not sure that any of the former replies actually answered your question. Your question as I understand it was logging the total calories burned during the exercise period or only the calories above and beyond what you would have burned if you were not exercising. That is called NET calories burned. To be totally accurate it probably should be NET calories but the site is not set up for that and the average person is so confused about how to handle exercise calories that throwing NET calories burned into the equation would likely cause mass amounts of confusion for most people, especially since everyone has different resting metabolic rates. There would not really be an easy way for the exercise data base to take into account everyones different resting metabolic rates during that period of time so you would have to do the math yourself. I think what a lot of us do is just not eat ALL the exercise calories. Unless one is exercising for hours and hours a day the difference is likely to be less than 100 calories in any case anyway and it is easier to just do it the way the site is set up, realizing the inaccuracies of estimating calorie expenditure in any case.

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