eating back your exercised calories?

HowlinAl wrote: »

oh_happy_day wrote: »

HowlinAl wrote: »

oh_happy_day wrote: »

I log my exercise because I like to ensure I'm eating enough (calories and macros) on days where I exercise a lot. I'm petite so my calorie goal is low, without eating back calories I could be netting as low as 500 calories on some days. Appetite is not always an accurate way to guess whether I should/shouldn't eat more. I also have fitness goals and enjoy regular (vigorous!) exercise, so I'd rather not under-eat and lose more lean muscle mass than is absolutely necessary. I don't use the MFP estimates, I have a Polar HRM which is still dubious at times but more accurate the database.

Watching the scale is the way to ensure you are eating too much/not enough, not using some bizarre and pointless metric that I think everyone here agrees is ridiculously inaccurate.

I see people every day logging in their diaries that they are burning hundreds and hundreds, sometime thousands of calories a day from exercise that is only giving them maybe 1/4 of that in reality...and then eating them back. if you are trying to lose weight and you are eating back these bogus numbers provided by MFP you are setting yourself up for failure.

if you want to track exercise use a separate app or program that won't interfere with your food diary.

Well, I'm not failing. I'm losing steadily and have been the entire time I've been on MFP. I already said that I don't use the MFP database to calculate my calorie burn. So, why are you so insistent that your way is the only and right way? It's clearly not as there are plenty of people in here who track their exercise calories and eat some of them back and are losing/maintaining successfully.

Maybe you should research the meaning of "forum." The OP asked a question, my responses are among many. No one is forcing you to agree with me, so what's your problem? Why don't you take your own advice?

Ouch - let's keep it friendly?

I do eat mine back. I work out quite a bit and some of them are intense so there is no way I'd manage on just 1200 calories. If that were the case I'd probably be in minus calories some days and I don't want to invoke "starvation mode" which is counterproductive.

I want my system to be a way of life that works for me long term. Being hungry doesn't work for me and if I'm doing some intense workouts I tend to be hungrier than 1200 calories will allow. I'm losing weight slowly but my body is changing; I've lost inches, I've got definition, I look toned and healthy. I can accept a slower loss as when I listen to my body I need more than 1200 a day when training.

I don't *deliberately* eat mine back, but then I'm so sedentary that usually my exercise calories are giving me BACK food that MFP wanted to take away from me for being such a lump!
Though I will note that last night, seeing that a) I had a nice deficit thanks to a solid workout and b) I was under on protein intake for the day by a lot, I said "dangit, I'm having some almonds as an evening snack" even though I wasn't specifically hungry. I still came in under on calories for the day, though the nuts pushed me over a smidge on fat. It was worth it.