For those that "eat your exercise calories" back...

awesome question! i wanna know the same thing!!!

bump! Don't think my HRM does that where it tells me all that cool stuff, who knows maybe it does lol Love to know the answer to that!

I enter them all but depending on the burn might not have the appetite to eat it all back. I never considered the fat vs carbs or protein burn. At some point, you won't have the "fat" stores to burn from so I would think at least then you'd need to eat it all back (or before your workout actually) to keep your body fueled. I've lost 20lbs and have not stalled or gained by logging and eating as much of it all back as possible.

Remember that MFP gives you a deficit so even if you ate back everything your burned, you still have (depending on your goal settings) 500-1000 calories less than maintenance so you will still lose according to planned goals. If you don't eat it all back, you will be creating a larger deficit than that required to meet your 1-2lb loss per week.

I'm a fan of the theory "don't eat if you're not hungry" so I'd suggest listening to your body. If you eat it back for a few days and you notice a stall or slight gain, you can always stop eating as much or any of it back, but I doubt that would happen until you get closer to your goal weight and loss slows down.

I eat them all back. If I do not, I continue to drop weight, when I am trying to maintain.

I don't eat any of them back. I keep ot totally at my given calorie goal. (besides the days i eat way too much, birthdays, holydays ond so on)

I personally just make sure that my net calories are close to 1200 and I try to burn between 500-1000 calories

If we were in an ideal world where we can measure every calorie we eat and burn with 100% accuracy, then I would say eat every single calorie back. In the real world we have a margin of error. Our HRM (or other means of estimating) are not 100% accurate for calorie burn. Our food logging is not always quite correct due to human error or bad info in the database.

I think everyone has to find their own system based on some trial & error. If you suspect you're over-reporting your calorie burn, then don't eat them all back. If you suspect you're under-reporting, then do eat them all back.

I actually go ahead and eat them all back. Am I over-reporting my calories burned? Maybe / probably. I'm also probably under-reporting the calories I consume. But I know that my "daily calorie goal" according to MFP is a bit on the low side, so I have that as a buffer.

Just try to stay as consistent as possible with with whatever you're doing and make changes gradually and give each change some time, so you can observe what difference it made.

The key is to honor your intended calorie deficit as closely as possible. We want enough deficit to lose weight, but not so much as to slow our metabolisms too much.

bump :-)

I go by what the machines at the gym or MFP say I burned and I do my best to eat all my exercise calories. If my calorie deficit is too large I stop burning fat. Yes, starvation mode is real!

I eat some or all of them back depending on how much exercise I do, but I set the calories burned lower than suggested by MFP.

For example, the calories burned for 60 mins of "casual racquetball" is something like 720 cal/hour ( and > 1000 for "competitive" racquetball). I don't believe that for a second. So, instead I give myself 300 cal/hour, which seems to be about right for me. (I'm a pretty efficient player.) That rate is too low if I play for more than an hour, which is usual, so I eat back about 500 calories if I've played for 2 hours.

So far, that seems to be working for me. At 1400 cal/day goal, I'm losing about 1 lb/wk, which is what I want.

Another biggie - is the HRM subtracting the calories you would have burned if you did absolutely NOTHING for the X number of minutes you exercised? In other words does it give you the net or the gross calories? That's a HUGE downfall if you do steady state for very long periods.

Actually, does MFP give you net or gross? I'm guessing net, but...?

This is what I do...If I burn 500 calories in one hour of working out, I subtract my resting metabolic rate per hour. So...Say your RMR is 1400 a day, that would be about 59 calories per hour if you were laying in bed doing nothing. I subtract those 59 calories from the 500 I burned and that is the number I log. I do not eat all those exercise calories back all the time though, but I could (and probably should), sometimes I just am not hungry enough. I know my HRM says the fat calories burned as well, but I guess I don't do anything with that information...Hope I helped a little bit.