Eating exercise calories

MFP set you up to lose without exercising at all. So when you do exercise, you're burning more calories than they expect. In order to keep your deficit the same and fuel your body, you should be eating them back. However, as burns are often overstated bot here and on machines, it's recommended to only eat back 50-75% of your exercise calories.

If you're hungry then eat 50% back.

Fat loss comes from what and how much you eat. Exercise should be for other fitness goals such as strength, muscle mass, endurance, cardiovascular health, balance, mobility, agility, speed, etc. You should most definitely eat back the calories to ensure you have the fuel necessary to exercise the next time.

Allan Misner
NASM Certified Personal Trainer (Corrective Exercise Specialist, Fitness Nutrition Specialist)
Host of the 40+ Fitness Podcast

Not the number MFP calculates

It is crazy high

I use Garmin VivoActive and had an Edge 500 calorie calculators with a heart rate monitor

MFP numbers were over double the Garmin numbers using the same heart rate monitor

The MFP numbers were off by enough to stall my weight loss for a bit until I got the Garmin and used those numbers to gauge eating back calories

The food log is great on MFP

The forums are useful

The calorie burn numbers are bad on the high side

RuNaRoUnDaFiEld wrote: »

AllanMisner wrote: »

Fat loss comes from what and how much you eat. Exercise should be for other fitness goals such as strength, muscle mass, endurance, cardiovascular health, balance, mobility, agility, speed, etc. You should most definitely eat back the calories to ensure you have the fuel necessary to exercise the next time.

Allan Misner
NASM Certified Personal Trainer (Corrective Exercise Specialist, Fitness Nutrition Specialist)
Host of the 40+ Fitness Podcast

Can you explain this? Surely fat loss comes from being in a deficit not what you eat.

Yes, in general, a deficit is needed. But can you say with complete certainty how many calories your body burned in a given day? It is an estimate and eating at too much of a deficit can cause issues with your metabolism that cause you to burn less. So, I would opt for foods that are lower in glycemic index and tend to be more satiating. I’d also opt for foods that don’t cause inflammation. So, yes, your choice of foods does matter. It isn’t just a simple math calculation, it is much more complicated than that.

Allan Misner
NASM Certified Personal Trainer (Corrective Exercise Specialist, Fitness Nutrition Specialist)
Host of the 40+ Fitness Podcast

middlehaitch wrote: »

@AllanMisner are you referring to a form of thermal adaptation when you say 'eating at too much of a deficit can cause issues with your metabolism that cause you to burn less'?

Cheers, h.

Well, there is some thermal effect with food, but that is nearly negligible. If you go at too much of a deficit, your body shuts down certain aspects to stay alive. This is often referred to as “starvation mode.” For most people, targeting a 1 - 2 lb loss per week is optimal. You can cut more rapidly, but have to be careful that you’re not causing metabolic damage.

katep2505 wrote: »

should I be eating back the calories I burn in exercise?
I don't know but doesn't that make the exercise kind of pointless?

The main purpose of exercise is physical fitness. Your calorie goal already has a deficit built in. Therefore, if you eat back your exercise calories (or most of them to account for overestimated calorie burns), you'll still have your deficit.

ModernRock wrote: »

AllanMisner wrote: »

If you go at too much of a deficit, your body shuts down certain aspects to stay alive. This is often referred to as “starvation mode.” For most people, targeting a 1 - 2 lb loss per week is optimal. You can cut more rapidly, but have to be careful that you’re not causing metabolic damage.

I'm totally on board with the idea of fueling your exercise, which was the OP's main question.

On the other hand, the "starvation mode" concept is of little use when talking about a deficit of a few hundred calories for somebody still eating 1200+ calories a day. Nothing is going to "shut down". There's not causing "metabolic damage." We're not talking about somebody that already has very low body fat training for a marathon.

For people following MFP calorie restriction, who presumably are eating 1200+ calories a day and have excess body fat, the main problem with not eating back exercise calories is that they might find their level of activity unsustainable. This may cause them to be at higher risk of giving up or falling into unplanned cycles of binge eating.

I was responding to a very specific question from someone else, sorry I didn’t cover every exit. The question was about food choice. Some foods are more satiating, and some individuals get different blood sugar responses to different foods. We love to make simple rules, when human bio-chemistry and genetic expression are anything but simple. http://news.meta.com/2015/11/19/cell-nutrition-is-personal-identical-foods-produce-healthy-and-unhealthy-responses-in-different-individuals/

If that 1200 calories was an absolute, I would have used it. It too is a simple rule that applies much of the time, but not always. The OP didn’t mention how intense their exercise program was. You can try running an ultra-marathon on that calorie intake and see what shuts down. Each person needs to find their own balance of fuel and fat loss. If they are doing intense workouts, they should consider eating back many if not all of those calories, again, assuming they’ve managed an appropriate deficit elsewhere.

My approach is that food leads to fat loss and exercise should be considered for other fitness modalities (strength, muscle mass retention/gain, endurance, cardiovascular, mobility, balance, etc.). If you want to optimize the fitness aspect of this (exercise) then fueling is important. Fat loss matters, but it shouldn’t be the only thing people focus on when trying to get healthy and fit.

Allan Misner
NASM Certified Personal Trainer (Corrective Exercise Specialist, Fitness Nutrition Specialist)
Host of the 40+ Fitness Podcast