How can I log excercise and not have it affect my calorie allowance for the day?

Ready2Rock206 wrote: »

Just change it to 1 or 2 calories earned.

Yup

MFP is based on a NEAT (Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis) goal, i.e., it sets your calorie target without taking exercise into account. So if you exercise, it adds that to your goal, to keep you from eating too little.

If you don't want to do that, manually change your exercise calories to "1" when you log them on MFP.

Well, you can either end your day with the deficit from your exercise (there's no rule saying you have to end the day near zero calories remaining), not log your exercise, or not worry about it. If you're going on a long hike, you're burning calories. There's a lot of discussion in these message boards about the merits of "eating back" exercise calories, but as long as your net calorie intake (food minus exercise) is close to your goal net calorie intake, you'll be able to get the deficit and the loss you want. If it really bothers you, I think premium has a way to edit how exercise is added to your daily totals (but I'm a free user, so I wouldn't know). My advice to you in general, from my own experience, though, is that it ends up working out well if you keep your net calories consistent. Of course, if you're only burning 100-200 cals, it's not that big of a change, but if you hiked for several hours and burned a lot of calories, you will may find that you'll need to eat the calories you burned to replenish your glycogen stores and have energy for your next hike

Why don't you want to track exercise and have it adjust your net calories? You could eat a little more after your hike.

There is a reason mfp does that. It's goal is steady sustainable weightloss. More active you are the more you need to eat to keep your deficit at the same amount each day/week.