exercise settings

No. Nope. And No.

The exercise settings on here do NOT affect your calorie goal. They are separate goals, unrelated to your calories. It's so you can see if you have worked out and met your goals in terms of time and cals burned. you should ALWAYS log your exercise and eat back at least a portion of your calories. (enough to get your net #to 1200-1300)

I think I finally figured thigns out about exercise calories. As long as you set your exercise calories to 0, then it's okay to eat back the exercise calories.. but if you sent your exercise to 5x 1 hour a week, then it will take that into account and already give you extra calories to account for that.

If you log your exercise and then eat it back, I think you will have consumed too many calories.

Am I wrong? any advice on this?

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Sorry, but you are way wrong on this. MFP ignores your exercise goal in your profile and the calories it gives you are to meet your goal without exercise, that way when you do exercise and enter it the calories get added to your day to keep your caloric deficit the same whether you workout or not, and is the only way to meet your goal caloric deficit to lose your goal amount of weight.

If your maintenance is 1900 cals and you pic lose 1 lb/week MFP will give you 1400 cals/day (500 cal deficit), regardless of your exercise goals. If you exercise and burn 400 cals your deficit grows to 900 (500+400) and to keep your deficit at your goal amount you must eat back the 400 cals. 900-400= your goal of 500. So you get to eat 1800 (1400+400) to make sure your deficit is at your goal amount.

Eating 1400 and not exercising is the same as eating 1800 and burning 400 from exercise, they both give you a net of 1400 calories and the same caloric deficit from what you would need to eat to maintain your weight.

So I checked a little bit under my diet/exercise settings and changed my workout from 5X/30 minutes to zero and zero and my calories didn't change. I think it just gives you extra calories if you change your average day from sedentary to say active. For simplicity I would set it to sedentary and then log all your exercise.

If you're truly working out 5x/week, I would set it to at least "Active". The closer MFP's estimate is to your actual maintenance calories, the better it works.

My job is sedentary though.. And I log my workout calories..

My job is sedentary too. But I now have my activity level set to "Very Active", and I still log and eat all my exercise calories (and yes I'm losing my targeted 1 lb/week, actually a bit more on average). The way MFP describes the activity levels is misleading, and I think it's messing a lot of people up. If you're working out regularly, then your real-life maintenance burn is more like Active or Very Active. If you search around and try out other calorie burn calculators, or use one of those BodyBugg or Bodymedia things, you can verify.

I posted a topic on this in the Suggestions forum.
http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/184243-fitness-profile-labels-are-wrong-misleading

Of course not everyone agrees, but luckily what they think doesn't affect my progress :bigsmile:

When you pick your activity level on MFP you are supposed to ignore exercise, it you accounted for it then you shouldn't log it or you would just be double counting the calories burned from exercise. It may be working for you now but that is not how MFP is set up to work.

I am absolutely not double-counting my exercise. I'm one of the most OCD people on this site in terms of trying to measure with as much precision as possible.

Let's review: MFP is set up to work by telling you how many calories you should consume in order to maintain a calorie deficit. The calorie deficit is calories burned minus calories consumed. Calories burned is your maintenance calories plus daily exercise. Maintenance calories are calculated from BMR multiplied by a factor based on activity level. What I'm saying is that if you work out *consistently* 6 or 7 times a week, even with a desk job, your activity level is absolutely, positively greater that what MFP calls sedentary.

Here's a thought experiment: Consider a guy who has a desk job and never exercises as compared to a guy who has a desk job and works out every day. Now pick a random day of the week and suppose neither of them exercises or leaves the house that day. Do you really think the never-exercising guy will burn as many calories as the workout-every-day guy that day?

When you pick your activity level on MFP you are supposed to ignore exercise, it you accounted for it then you shouldn't log it or you would just be double counting the calories burned from exercise. It may be working for you now but that is not how MFP is set up to work.

Here's a thought experiment: Consider a guy who has a desk job and never exercises as compared to a guy who has a desk job and works out every day. Now pick a random day of the week and suppose neither of them exercises or leaves the house that day. Do you really think the never-exercising guy will burn as many calories as the workout-every-day guy that day?

Yes, within 5% of the same anyway. If they have the same BF % are same age height and weight then yes they should burn roughly the same, and actually the more fit guy that works out may actually burn less as he has a lower resting HR.

Do you have a reference? Based on what you're saying, I assume you disagree that the Harris-Benedict principle is valid?

That is what MFP does for you when you add exercise to the your day the Harris-Benedict principle assumes you workout every day and does not add on more when you exercise as the equation assumes you will exercise. MFP takes this guess work out and doesn't give you anything for exercise until you actually perform it. The end point is the same, but your way exercise in being counted twice.

Well maybe I have a freak metabolism, because as it stands now, my setting is at Very Active, and when my exercise is added to that, the calories that MFP thinks I've burned are still less than what the BodyMedia fit is reporting (i.e., my calorie deficit is in fact even larger than even what MFP calculates even on the Very Active setting). Sure, those are just theoretical numbers, but my real-life results are right on track with the theory.

Double-counting my exericse? No. If anything under-counting slightly.

I wish the developers would chime in and clarify the intention/design of the Activity Level setting. Mike, are you reading this?

Ok I reached out to Mike. Will follow up if I get a response.

Ok I reached out to Mike. Will follow up if I get a response.

Did you ever have or think about having your BMR tested. I'm not sure where it can be done but if you burn that much and still lose I bet your BMR is much higher than MFP calculates it to be.

That's definitely something I would like to do / should do. Also would like to get my BF% professionally measured. I understand that lots of gyms offer such services, sometimes via third party. Yeah, I should look into it.

Eric mentioned this, but I wanted to reiterate:

When you set up your account, MFP asks for your "exercise goals". Say you entered that you'll exercise for 30 min. 4 times a week. Great. That is ONLY a goal. MFP makes no changes to anything with that information. It's basically purely there as a guide to see if you're actually doing your intended exercise.

So then you go and do your 30 minutes. You log it. MFP will THEN add calories to maintain the deficit you chose, based on your loss per week goal.