Please Explain

it's because of the way this particular site is set up - it builds in your deficit, so if you exercise, that deficit will increase (sometimes to a potentially dangerous proportion). so, you have to eat back whatever excess you burn off.

user Taso42 put this together - it might help explain things better than i can: www.shouldieatmyexercisecalories.com

To be honest even my dr had never heard of eating back exercise calories. it was something new to a lot of people. each person is different. If I eat them back I gain wait or maintain even though there is a deficit. when I actually eat under or my exact calories i lose at a slow and steady rate. other people don't lose unless they eat them back. you evidently are doing well losing so much w/o eating them back. Congrats!

First, stick to what you are doing because the final arbiter of any methodology is this: DOES IT WORK. IS IT PRODUCING THE DESIRED RESULTS and not generating any adverse side effects. But keep logs, the food diary, etc. because as you continue to lose you will find that many people need to tweak what they are doing to obtain further results, depending on how far you are trying to go. Your personal, accurate data will be the single most effective resource to help you evaluate further changes. Your scale and mirror will then convey the outcome.

Adding back calories-- I don't do this. I don't do it because it is sometimes difficult to accurately measure some foods, and my bias is to treat those instances as overstated rather understated. Also, all measures that I can find of BMR use very minimal inputs to determine actual BMR expenditure. I wonder if they could overstate. I know some do because they don't factor in age, bodyfat%, and the indices associated with metabolic and thyroid panels. So that is the food side. On the exercise side, there are difficulties with obtaining precise, replicable measurements of the caloric expenditure of any particular exercise. Finally, on the psychological side, humans possess an astonishing capacity for rationalizing their behavior, and in some instances this becomes quasi-delusional. You will find people that haven't made much progress, still very overweight, yet insist on a refined fascination with adding back their calories. They will point to concepts that are very controversial IF they are taken out of context and without the appropriate precise definitions and attendant considerations. They also mistake reasonable hunger, which will manifest EVEN in the face of excess calories sometimes, like with high, frequent ingestion of refined carborhydrates. Man, if you were eating 6000 calories and now are eating 5500 calories, for a bit you are going to feel it. I just dropped 100 calories for the last 2 days and gosh, I am hungry.

Now, fairness in treating a topic is very crucial to a balanced and holistic understanding. I will support eating back calories IF and WHEN it could be reasonably precisely established what BMR is, what daily activity is, and what caloric values any exercise expends. THEN if those parameters were employed to set the right goal calories on a daily, rolling 3 day average, or disciplined weekly average, then I could see adding back in exercise calories. But I have a life, and I don't know if I could get all that anyway consistently, so I make it much simpler and achieve optimal results, period.

Opinion: For most people--don't bother.

BUMP!!!