Calories gained through exercise

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QuintinVAbrams
QuintinVAbrams Posts: 16 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
A general question. When you exercise you get a "credit" to your daily calorie allowance, so you calorie allowance is more the more you exercise. Can I just ask everyone, what do you do with that "credit" do you actually eat a bit more?

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  • pinkteapot3
    pinkteapot3 Posts: 157 Member
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    I eat all my exercise calories.

    My normal target is 1,280 a day. If I earn 300 cals with exercise, I eat 1,580.

    My goal is 1lb loss per week and I've lost 10lbs in 7 weeks.

    You'll now get a stream of people telling you that the MFP exercise cals are inaccurate and you should only eat 50-75% of what you earn.

    I log running and cycling. When I run and cycle I measure them with apps - I know how many minutes I've done at what speed. For these, MFP cals are accurate. They're the same as those calculated by my heart rate monitor. Exercise needs to be logged as accurately as food.
  • yesimpson
    yesimpson Posts: 1,372 Member
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    Oh yes! I take calorie estimations with a pinch of salt though. I've worked out that I personally can only eat 80% of the calories back which the gym machines/Runkeeper app tell me I've burnt or I won't maintain my weight, so you may want to be conservative at first. But why would you not want a bit of extra food, or to save up for a more calorific meal at the weekend? You earned it. Not eating back exercise calories can make your daily calorie intake too low, as MFP already builds in a reasonable deficit, and eating far too few calories can cause you to get overhungry or to lose more muscle than you would want along with the fat.
  • pinkteapot3
    pinkteapot3 Posts: 157 Member
    edited February 2015
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    Good point about why eating at least some exercise cals is important. Imagine if you spent one day sat on the couch, and the next climbing a mountain. You know you'd need to eat a lot more on the second day! Burned cals need to be replaced. :smile:

    I have friends that eat 4-5,000 cals a day because they do very physical jobs and none of them are overweight. If I ate that much I'd be the size of a house.

    You daily goal puts you in deficit so you'll lose weight. If you don't eat back your exercise cals then you're undereating which isn't healthy.
  • Christi102012
    Christi102012 Posts: 87 Member
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    I normally only eat about half my exercise calories back to help cover any inaccuracies in my food logging or the inaccurate MFP exercise calories. If I have to run on a treadmill I'll compare the treadmill's estimated calorie burn with the MFP database and take the lower number. It's all up to you on what you want to do. You can try eating back all your exercise calories back for a while and if you're not losing as fast as you'd like, cut back on how much of those you eat.

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