Eating Excercise Calories

calories of 400, then you ate 1600 calories a
day & eating the 400 calories wipes out the calories you burned from exercising.......So if you are going to eat the calories you
burned from exercising what is the point of exercising ???

No because the MFP calculator subtracts 500-1000 calories out based on your goal setting. So, eating back your exercise calories keeps you at a healthy deficit.


Let's put this another way, because frankly, MFP makes it confusing.

The calories you need per day =

Your Basal Metabolic Rate
Plus
Normal daily expenditure for activity before exercise
Plus
Daily expenditure for exercise.

When you eat all those calories your weight stays stable.

When you eat 500 less, it's about 1 pound per week weight loss

When you 1000 less it's 2lb per week,

There are absolute limits that men and women should not go below.


MFP subtracts the 500 or 1000 out up front and sets your intake to BMR+Normal activity before exercise less that 500-1000. This is why it adds calories earned through exercise.

Thanks!

So I am completely frustrated. I have my calories set at 1200 per day. I also excercise using a heart rate monitor and I normally burn 400-800 calories a day.

I am eating my 1200 calories and then when I punch in my excercise calories, it says to eat those calories as well. SO I DO!

I have lost a lot of weight but would like to lose about 7 more pounds. My weight is going up rather than down with the plan of eating 1200 calories and eating my excercise calories.

Am I doing this correctly?

Don't go under 1200 for more than a couple of days. You might lose a little more but it will eventually slow down, stop and possible head in the other direction. This is a baseline number to stay out of starvation mode. You may have to re-calculate your goals. I.e. change 1lb per week to .5lb per week. I just upped my calories from 1250 to 1500 and dropped another pound this past week. You can check out the posts in my signature. There is a lot of information.

And I don't know if everyone does this or exactly how important it is but since my HRM would give me a burned calorie number just sitting there I like to subtract that out so I get the calories burned amount for the actual activity.

Take the Maintenance calories (the calories before the deficit MFP gave you) and divide that by 1440 (minutes in a day). Mine was 1480 and I divide by 1440. 1480/1440 = 1.03. I multiply 1.03 and the number of minutes of exercise (say 60) = 62 calories. I subtract that from the total calories burned. It doesn't seem like a lot but I'm anal like that.

Never eat back calories, it doesn't make any sense. Stored as fat calories aren't dealt with in the same way as digested calories. Most people here seem to lose around 1-1.5lb a week and if they didn't eat back the 400 calories or so, the worst they'd do is burn around 1500-2000 calories back for the week - which would net around an extra pound of fat lost.

For the guys I prep I never get them to eat back calories, ever. Doesn't make any sense.

Never eat back calories, it doesn't make any sense. Stored as fat calories aren't dealt with in the same way as digested calories. Most people here seem to lose around 1-1.5lb a week and if they didn't eat back the 400 calories or so, the worst they'd do is burn around 1500-2000 calories back for the week - which would net around an extra pound of fat lost.

For the guys I prep I never get them to eat back calories, ever. Doesn't make any sense.

Not eating them is only a good idea if you set your original goal to account for exercise.