Stupid Question Alert: "Eat back your calories"

It depends a bit on where you got the number of calories you burned. MFP is considered to be high in the number of calories burned for an activity. Therefore, you may not have burned 753 calories. Many people eat back between 50% and 75% of the calories they burn just to be on the safe side.

In general, you should be getting close to your calorie goal but you won't reach it exactly and you should strive to be under it. There will be days when you have a few hundred calories left over. That's okay. There will be days when you may go over a bit. That's okay, too, if it's only occasionally.

If you aren't hungry, have met your macros and have some calories left over and don't want a treat, you've done well for the day. Enjoy your success.

@PaytraB Its not a stupid question but has been asked and answered hundreds of times.
Personally I have used the 50% rule with fairly good results.
The link below takes you to a Blog with what I consider to be a good source of information.

https://blog.myfitnesspal.com/ask-the-dietitian-should-i-eat-back-my-exercise-calories/

Try this link to the search function where you can put in your question and come up with a large listing of posts/information.
http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/search?adv=&search=Eat+back+your+calories&title=&author=&cat=all&tags=&discussion_d=1&comment_c=1&group_group=1&within=1+day&date=

Connect your accounts at http://www.myfitnesspal.com/fitbit

Set your goal to .5 lb. for every 25 lbs. you're overweight: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/account/change_goals_guided

Enable negative calorie adjustments: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/account/diary_settings

Ignore your Fitbit calorie goal and follow MFP's, eating back your adjustments. No need to log any step-based activity—your Fitbit is tracking it for you. Log non-step exercise (like swimming or biking) either in Fitbit or in MFP—never both. Exercise logged in MFP overwrites your Fitbit burn during that time.

You can learn more in the Fitbit Users group: http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/group/1290-fitbit-users

6502programmer wrote: »

As my exercise adjustment climbs, I was wondering whether to treat it as a gift to be gobbled, a treasure to be squirreled away, or something in between. I think I'll stick with letting the Fitbit monitor overall burn and let MFP tell me how what I'm eating hews to the plan.

Your increased adjustments reflect the increased energy necessary to fuel your increased activity.

I think it's more of a personal preference than any sort of set rule. For me personally, I dont want to eat back my exercise calories. Like others have stated, many sites & devices grossly overestimate how many calories you actually burned, so you could easily get into trouble here & dramatically slow your weight loss.

When I exercise, I like knowing that the calories that I burned are contributing to my calorie deficit & not just going toward more food that I can eat. With that being said, I think eating back a percentage of your calories burned is ok if you find that you're hungry or if you need them. I know some people use exercise calories for special occasions when they plan to splurge a little. Like the above poster mentioned, play around with it a little & see what works best for you. If you're happy with your rate of weight loss then whatever method you choose is the right one for you. Good luck!

People get confused about this because there are different ways to calculate your calorie deficit.

For example, once upon a time I did something on WebMD that basically estimated what you were eating and then suggested that you aim at -2 lb/week by reducing calories 500/day and trying to up exercise 500/day. You wouldn't have eaten more on days you exercised, as your goal presumed exercise.

Similarly, if you use the TDEE method (as I now do), you will figure your overall maintenance (including the exercise you do) and cut calories from that. Once again the goal assumes exercise, so you wouldn't eat it back.

Many doctors/dieticians will do something similar -- talk to you to understand your activity level and thus likely maintenance and then suggest a starting goal based on that. Once again, it implicitly includes the activity (or is based on an understanding that the activity isn't that significant). (For example, I have maintenance around 1550 if sedentary but also do exercise quite hard, as I'm training for a half ironman triathlon. I would hope a doctor wouldn't say my exercise is irrelevant and I should eat 1050 to lose 1 lb / week or some such, but that's in essence what people who say we should ignore exercise are saying.)

You can do something similar on MFP. For example, use an "active" level rather than counting back exercise calories (not technically how it's supposed to work but do-able). You also (if someone who can reasonably aim at 2 lb/week) could set it up to lose 1-1.5 lb/week and then treat the exercise as a bonus to hit your 2 lb.

What I personally think is a bad idea is setting MFP for the max reasonable loss while claiming to be sedentary--2 lbs, of course--and then get your expected 1200 calories and THEN exercise very hard on top of that. Unless your logging is very poor (and if so that should be fixed), that's going to create an overly aggressive and non-sustainable deficit for many or most. It's also going to undermine any benefits from hard exercise and risk losing more muscle than is necessary.

When I started I was nervous to eat back exercise but quickly learned that I was still losing MORE than MFP predicted despite eating back about 75% or more. As a result it seems that I was logging pretty well. I'd say it's worth trusting yourself and eating back some--again, at least to the extent it's significant--and then adjusting if you don't seem to be getting the results expected (which likely means either the calculator is overstating your maintenance or you are logging poorly).

This link does a great job of breaking everything down, explaining all of the terms, and explaining why MFP expects you to eat back your exercise calories.

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/818082/exercise-calories-again-wtf/p1

6502programmer wrote: »

So far, I've been seeing expected results between logging, burn rate, and weight loss, so it's all been pretty accurate. As my exercise adjustment climbs, I was wondering whether to treat it as a gift to be gobbled, a treasure to be squirreled away, or something in between. I think I'll stick with letting the Fitbit monitor overall burn and let MFP tell me how what I'm eating hews to the plan.

The fact that you are achieving expected results indicates that the calculations are accurate for you. So just keep doing what you're doing. As to what to do with the extra calories, it your choice. Eat them all, eat some and save the rest for another day. My goal was to be as close to zero calories left by the end of the week. Best of luck and continued success.