Can I burn off 1200 calories then eat a pizza?

The whole pizza? I could maybe do three pieces. If I were you I'd fuel that hike with a little carb, a little protein before, and carry a little hikers mix with me.

Not that it will change how your body burns, but if your glycogen stores get used up mid-hike you are going to hit a wall.

I don't know, but if you do let me know the outcome

As a very general rule of thumb, yes, you want to eat a lot of protein right after an extended calorie burn. Pizza isn't what I would pick, but do what works for you. The rule of thumb on MFP is eat eat back 1/2 to 2/3 the calories MFP (or another app/device) calculates you burned to allow for s margin of error.

As others have noted, weight changes, while simplistically reduced to "calories in:calories out" and "3500 calorie deficit to lose a pound" are not linear. You need to look at an aggregate 2-3 week view, at a minimum.

On the flip side, no one day is going to make or break your prospects for success.

If your general pattern is to be within your calorie goal, one day should make no difference in the long term.

In the short term, especially if you do eat a lot of pizza, carbs, sodium, and poor hydration all lead to water retention. I would not be surprised to see a weight spike immediately after (i.e., the next day) making those choices. Three to five days out with more typical intake/hydration/activity will probably give you a clearer picture.

I say, "go for it"! And yay you! I love pizza and love walking, so I'm envious of the awesome day you'll be having.

Have a wonderful time!

um.sure. I would rather drink a bottle of wine, hell have both.

I just ate a whole (small) pizza because I've had a pretty epic deficit the last 4 days. I'm feeling pretty damn good about it. It was a flippin' magnificent pizza.

Is your question about what effect it will have on weight loss? The equation doesn't change because either pizza or hiking is involved. If you burn 1800 calories and eat 1200 over the same period, then you have a 600 calorie deficit. Except the ins and outs are balanced over a longer period of time than 1 day. Its a constant, ongoing, cyclical process. But we break it down into days usually to make it easier to manage. You could eat nothing for one day and then eat the extra 1200 calories the next day and have the same effect, weight wise (or eat the pizza and then fast for a day), but it would be a much less pleasant experience.

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Absolutely!! I couldn't have stuck with it for the past 6 months without the freedom and flexibility exercise gives me with my diet.

Funny thing ... we're not much in the way of social butterflies, but in the 6 weeks or so after signing on here last Feb, we had friends visiting from overseas, my birthday, and just a list of social stuff one weekend after the other. If it weren't for lots and lots of cycling and hiking and other exercise, I would have really been struggling.

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I'm similar. We are't super social, but when we do get together, we have fun and let loose.

I had a day we had friends over for a BBQ/funfest day. I ate almost 6000 calories that day! Not a typo!

But I did fine for the week and it didn't hurt me long term.

Sure you can! But why would you want to exercise only to eat? It's fine to indulge yourself once in a while. I do it too.. Quite often actually..but go easy on the pizza

USAMcK wrote: »

Emma, thanks for commenting. I knew all that already! Yay us! I guess I should have titled this a science question and not a "how do I lose weight?" question.

I never use the MFP burn. I average what my heart rate monitor spits out and the Brayden online calculator. Worked to help me lose 80 lbs. last time.

I keep a running average and a weekly average on my own spreadsheet.

One day absolutely does not make a difference, you're right. Especially when my weekly average is spot on. Though I try not to borrow calories from one day to the next.

I eat pizza like twice a year so I'm not worried about ill effects.

I definitely worded this wrong to be getting all these off-topic answers. MY BAD.

Perhaps the answer you were looking for is that its cyclical.

Maybe this is more like what you were wondering:

Your body runs on glucose (ok, duh, bear with me). When you eat food, its broken down into various chemicals, one of which is glucose. *(Note: your body can actually manufacture glucose from carbohydrates, protein or dietary fat, if necessary.) When there is lots of glucose in your bloodstream (your blood sugar), then its readily available for all your cells to nom up and use for energy. In a well-functioning body system, glucose that is not needed immediately to fuel metabolism is stored either as glycogen in your liver and muscles, or as fat in your fat cells. For a while after you eat, all the glucose you need is available from recently eaten food. You're using up that glucose from the recently eaten food AT THE SAME TIME that some of it is being stored as either fat or glycogen or both. (The body has a limited storage capacity for glycogen, but a unlimited, or at least really large, capacity to store fat. Unfortunately.) After a while your meal will have finished being processing in the body, and if you don't eat again, you will start to burn glycogen and/or body fat to get the glucose that you need. Over the course of a day, you will go in and out of this storage/burn cycle a number of times, assuming that you don't keep eating enough continuously all day and night to stop from ever pulling on the stored resources.

So, that is why it does not matter (for weight loss) if you eat then hike, or hike then eat. Its constant, cyclical, and ongoing.

Here are some links that might be interesting:

http://www.med.upenn.edu/biocbiop/faculty/vanderkooi/
http://www.livestrong.com/article/331651-burning-fat-vs-glycogen/
http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/cellular-microscopic/fat-cell3.htm
http://www.livestrong.com/article/273899-do-fat-protein-turn-into-glucose/

Hope that was 1. fairly lucid, and 2. more in line with your thinking.