Do you eat all your suggested calories?

I eat my calories and a portion of my exercise calories and have been losing weight consistently.

"A lot" is very subjective

I eat my calories + as many of my exercise calories as I need to feel full at the end of the day. I have a Fitbit Flex and have it synced with MFP to give me some extra calories to eat.

I don't have much to work with as a 5' tall female so my weight loss is set as 0.5lb/week now. It was 1lb/week to start.

~Lyssa

No. I don't eat my exercise calories back. I've been losing 2 pounds weekly.

I try to stop short to make up for miscalculations (failed at that today), and I also try not to get into exercise calories if I'm not starving, as exercise calories can't be trusted.

I do not eat all of mine or eat back my exercise calories as I am trying to reach a certain goal by a certain date. I think it's a personal choice. MFP is set up so you CAN eat all your calories and about 50-75% of the calories you burn exercising and still consistently lose weight. It's really just trial and error. Eat the calories it suggests and about half of your burned calories from exercise back for about a week and see what your weight does and then go from there

kimsko2010 wrote: »

Do people eat all the recommended daily calories and lose weight? Seems like a lot. Curious what your experience has been!

1200 calories is not a lot ... so yeah, I eat them all or close to it.

I try hard to stay within the numbers MFP doles out for me. I'm going for one and a half pounds per week. On Fridays, if I've lost weight, I allow myself a cheat day. What that means to me, is that I allow myself to go up to what my maintenance macros would be. Only been back a few weeks, but it's working like it did before. Originally, I lost 61 pounds doing that. I'm back, because I stopped logging and let myself get carried away. Tough price to pay for a lot of hard work.

crewbprice wrote: »

I eat around my calorie limit, then workout for 30 min and let that be a net negative. Thus I am usually 400 calories net loss from the workout and for the day. I use the calorie limit for losing a pound per week. Thus, I should be losing a little less than 2 pounds per week with my extra workout loss giving me almost a additional pound loss.

So far I've lost 11 pounds in about 4 weeks, so I actually do better than what I should be according to the app. Hope this makes sense, I know it sounds confusing to me. Add me as friend and you can see my log, I log everything every day.

I could have written this nearly word for word, including losing 11 pounds in 4 weeks.

Until you log what you used to eat that caused slow weight gain, and perhaps with no exercise - it's really impossible to get a handle on "a lot" in comparison to nothing.
Wouldn't be shocked if your MFP eating goal on your non-exercise days is 1/2 what you used to eat.
And making that worse thinking that when you burn more you shouldn't eat more.


I do.
I enjoy hard workouts - and from years of experience, that can't happen if not eating enough.
Oh, they may feel like hard workouts with a tired body - but again, in comparison, they aren't until body has something to recover with and build stronger with.
I even got a Fitbit to monitor the daily activity so deficit wasn't too great, I manually log the other 1-3 hrs of the day that is exercise.

Rockin2014 wrote: »

No. I don't eat my exercise calories back. I've been losing 2 pounds weekly.

Um, why not?

I'm doing it a little differently. I've got my calorie goal set to maintenance and don't eat above that, but depending on the day I eat everything from 400 under to maintenance, if I eat back exercise calories depends on if I'm hungry after exercising.

You bet I do.

Yep, i eat back all of my exercise cals (plus i use a Heart Rate Monitor to make sure the cals i burn are accurate).
I have a big appetite, so have to eat them all back to ensure i have decent sized meals.
I've never been able to "eat like a Bird" (Lol) and to me, that's what 1200 cals feels like.
I haven't got much to lose, but i've lost 1lb a week so far (after 2 weeks).

kimsko2010 wrote: »

Do people eat all the recommended daily calories and lose weight? Seems like a lot. Curious what your experience has been!

So I'm going to do what I hate when other people do, but I'm going to answer your question with a question.

Your profile says you love to eat, but maintenance has gotten harder for you over the years. Plus you have put in you want to lose 38 lbs, approx. If that's the case, and you think your recommended daily calories is a lot (which MFP will auto calculate a deficit for you) then how did you get to a point where you feel you need to lose 38 lbs? Maybe you don't realize the caloric values in what you're eating now, but when you look at it 1,400 1,600 1,800 etc calories can be a lot of food - depending on how you spend you calories - or it can be very little food.

It's not a lot of calories - it's just enough for you and what you need. If you really feel you cannot eat the calories needed to lose weight because it's too much then I think you're probably eating more than you think you are because that number of calories is based on the stats you put into MFP, and is based on a deficit your stats would need to lose weight which mathematically is less than the calories you've been consuming to be at a point where you want to lose 38 lbs.