Eating back burned calories?

It seems to be different for everyone. If you search "eating exercise calories" you'll find several articles, threads and arguments about it. I personally, even on my good weeks, eat most of my exercise calories and am losing about a pound and a half a week. But, seriously, search it, you'll learn a lot.

One thing that took me a few weeks to understand is how MFP works. When you plug in you activity level, how much you want to lose per week, body info, etc it gives you a number that is a net calorie goal, not total calories you should eat per se.

So the deficit you need each day to lose your weekly total is already built into the number you get. When you exercise above what your activity level is you can eat those calories back and still maintain the deficit already built into the number of net calories MFP gives you!

I think the issue becomes eating too few calories and the negative impact it can have, starvation mode as mentioned. You can't just eat nothing and lose weight in a healthy way. Same thing with exercise I would think. Too much exercise and not enough fuel could lead to the same thing. You just need to maintain the deficit. For me wanting to lose 2lbs per week I need to eat 1000 calories less than I burn.

So if I don't exercise I eat less. If I do exercise I can eat more. Just need to maintain the 1000 calorie deficit per day.

Well, yes and no. With this site, they tell me that at the weight at i am now, I need to eat about 1200 cal a day to lose weight at a rate of about 1 pound per week. So if I burn 100 cal exercising and then also eat 100 more cal today, I should still lose weight. The more calories I burn, the more I can eat. And if I don't eat the ones I burn, I should just lose weight faster ( Like the way they do on Biggest Loser, burning a lot more than they eat!) It's a calories in , calories out theory. The more active you are, the more you can eat and still lose. Sometimes I eat the cal I burn, even exercising a lot if I know I want to go out to eat one day! And sometimes I just use them as a bonus weight loss boost, like when I go for a little 20 min walk, i may not eat any extra that day. Just make sure you are being safe and healthy. To lose weight at a healthy rate, you should eat most of what you burn. You weight loss will tell you if you're doing it right or not!

Yes, you are technically supposed to eat the exercise calories back because the way MFP is set up, they have built in a deficit for you already when you enter your stats and your goals. If you don't eat your exercise calories back, you will have a larger deficit...but you may be really hungry, you may not have tons of energy, you can also have some weird stuff go on with your metabolism if you don't eat any of them back. I've tried both eating them back and not eating them back, at different times in my weight loss journey, and both have worked for me at different times.

There are a ton of posts and threads on this topic. Everyone will have a different opinion, but in the end you gotta do what's right for your body. good luck!

i eat back half of my exercise calories and that seems to work for me