An objective look at eating "exercise calories"

Just a comment to the non-expert people reading this...BMR is not maintenance. Maintenance is your daily acitivity + BMR . So the deficit Steve is talking about should come from your maintenance, not your BMR.

To find out what MFP is calculating your maintenance to be, go to Home > Goals > and on the right side you will see Calories Burned from Normal Daily Activity. That is MFP's calculated maintenance based on your BMR, activity level, gender, and age. This page also shows what your daily deficit is based on the goals you entered to MFP. The idea here (on this site) is to keep that deficit steady, thus the program adds back the exercise burned calories..

Exactly. I do it out of habit, because it takes me a mere 5 seconds, and I'm a neurotic number cruncher, but 30-60 calories here and there when you are talking about 1800 over the course of a day, or burning 1000+ running 10 miles, makes very little difference. It just won't break the bank. No one measures every single gram of food they put into their mouth and any food that is even slightly processed will have only an approximate nutritional value, as is. So splitting hairs about a few calories here or there is really futile in the grand old scheme of things. Added stress with little to no pay off!

And you bring up an excellent point about added stress. I'm sure this will come across as overly blunt but it seems many dieters today go bat crap crazy about this stuff. They only see things in binary terms - particular foods are either healthy or horrible, their behavior is either good or bad, they're either successful or they failed, etc, etc. And all this sort of reasoning and perspective does is ramp up anxiety like crazy.

People are flipping out over 10 calories. And ya know what? I think it hurts them.

The stress response they're generating by being as anal retentive and psychotic as they are bites them in the *kitten*. Which is why I always recommend people read the book written by Robert Sapolsky called "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers." He's a great author and a genius when it comes to the stress response of the body. Humans unfortunately can work themselves up into such a psychological mess about the future by thinking about catastrophic thoughts and building psychological hurdles that are simply impossible to clear and thus, our biology that's really in place to keep us alive winds up going in overdrive in chronic terms.

Like I've said in numerous places on this forum now - our ability to manage stress is finite. In our body's mind, stress is stress have it be psychological, physical, real, imagined, etc. And when you've relatively small people eating like birds, doing copious amounts of exercise, stressing about work and family which is typical in this culture, and then topping it off with psychotic analysis and concern over diet and exercise - well - things tend to get messed up.

It's no wonder people are constantly stalling out, really. Granted, I believe more often than not it's a miscalculation on energy intake and expenditure, but still, this is very real.

Fat loss, sex drive, immune function, you name it and chronic stress will affect it, usually negatively.

People just need to relax, set realistic expectations, avoid perfectionism, and be patient.