Calories... the more we work out the more we can eat?

lemurcat12 wrote: »

MKEgal wrote: »

Both my dietician and weight doctor (he's an endocrinologist specializing in weight issues)
say to ignore exercise calories. They're a bonus toward losing weight.
That's been working for me.
Most people underestimate what they eat,
and most machines (including MFP) overestimate calories burned.
For most people, most of the time, those errors more or less cancel out.
If you're really hungry at the end of the day once in a while, eat 1/3 to 1/2 of your exercise calories.
.

wolfman wrote:

As to why you wouldn't want to just forgo those calories to potentially
lose faster? Well, part of being healthy and fit is actually learning how to
fuel your body and your activities. Underfeeding your body can lead to
recovery issues and injury while training... you shouldn't underfeed and train.

I've been eating below my BMR for over a year now (minus a few days here & there
like Thanksgiving) and my doctors are happy with both my overall health &
my progress in losing weight. That's considerably below the TDEE/MFP method.
Things might be different when someone is close to or at an ideal weight.
.

There is no TDEE/MFP method. The two methods are different, and neither has anything to do with not eating below BMR. (Not undereating means not having too extreme a deficit, which MFP caps at 1000 and TDEE method usually makes 20%, although I cut 500 calories off when I started doing it.)

My first several months here I routinely lost 2 lbs/week (sometimes up to 3 lbs) while eating back a good portion of my exercise calories. Yet according to you I should have eaten less because I must have been underestimating my calories eaten and overestimating my calories burned. I disagree and would suggest that aiming for a greater weight loss with the level of activity I was doing would have been underfeeding my body.

Your doctors' approach seems to work if someone really doesn't do a good job estimating calories, and maybe that's common (I've been half***ing it lately and am not doing a good job or losing, but I'm also 5 lbs from goal). However, some people fall on the other side of the scale and might habitually overestimate their calories or underestimate their activity. A good way to check on this is to look at how much you are actually losing per week. (As a personal matter, I'd be bothered by my doctors assuming I was too incompetent to count my calories properly, but then there's a reason I am not a good person to do a doctor managed approach and did this on my own.)

I don't think it's responsible, though, to tell a population at MFP who commonly are eating at 1200 and the maximum recommended deficit (1000 calories) that they should also exercise vigorously and not eat any extra calories to account for it. Unless you are regularly losing more than 2 lbs/week, you aren't doing that yourself, yet you consistently recommend it to people.