Do you log your exercise in MFP?

you want a total deficit of about 400-500 per day really to drop the pounds.

eating 1200-1300 or whatever is already a defincit of 400-500....so if you go and burn another 500...

see where im going with this?

Thats pretty close to what I have left each day if I exercise, so I am guessing thats good

You don't want to have 400-500 green calories left in your food diary. You want your food diary to be close to zero as possible every day. The poster is trying to say that you need a 400-500 calorie deficit to lose weight from your BMR (basal metabolic rate) + whatever you burn and eat back. Again MFP does this for you when you enter your stats and how much weight you want to lose.

Again, eat your exercise calories and don't stress people!!!! (It's just not healthy!)

Glad someone understood...lol. jeez.

I'll add to what i said...
you want a TOTAL deficit of 400-500 for weight loss.

so if you eat 1200(being your deficit), then exercise to burn 500 more, you have to eat another 500 to maintain that 500 deficit...

if you are someone who likes to go nuts with thier exercise, burning awesome numbers like 1000 from a big session, then guess what, you should be eating 2200 that day. no more, no less...2200 - 1000(exercise) = 1200...NET. The NET figure is the important one. Not the gross.

I stopped logging my calories burned for my exercise b/c I didnt like how MFP changed the calories, carbs, ect. I wanted to keep it at my calories that I should be eating for the day, regardless of if I exercised or not. After reading and reading (and stressing) about eating back your calories, I guess I get why MFP does that.

So, what to you think - is it really beneficial to log them into your food diary....or keep track of calories burned elsewhere (I have a calendar that I write my daily exercise on)?

I personally do NOT log my exercise. I know that I lose weight at an acceptable pace when I eat between 1500-1600 calories per day, whether I workout or not, because that's what I ate when I went from 191 pounds down to 128. Therefore I changed my goals manually to reflect that. I also changed the macro goals because I furiously disagree with such high carbs and fat with very low protein. I eat 40% carbs, 35% protein, and 25% fat. This is what consistently has worked for me. In fact, when I was actually doing MFP's plan with their designated values of things, I was hungry and moody and not getting much results. So I switched back to what I knew was right for my body all along and just stopped logging workouts so it wouldn't change my food log automatically. It's working great as I am already down 2 inches in my waist this year and nearly 7 pounds. For me that's great since I am at that last little bit of body fat that needs to go. :flowerforyou: