Do you eat up all your calories burnt while exercising?

Nope.

Yes. Both when losing weight and when maintaining.

If I was in maintenance mode as opposed to the currently, holy crap I need to lose 100+ lbs mode I'm currently in I would consider it but I'd probably never totally eat them back as I'd be somewhat skeptical of the accuracy of those calories in both directions.

No, but I do eat a little more (100-300 calories) on heavy exercise days. Between possibly underestimating calories in and overestimating calories burned, I like to have a cushion to cover discrepancies in both. Map My Hike and MFP give me what I think are crazy overestimates on calorie burn.

99% of the time no, but when I do I eat up to half of it back. It depends on the person tho, what your condition and your goal is.

snowflake930 wrote: »

Honest question, if you are eating all of your exercise calories back, how do you calculate for sure how many calories you burned. The exercise machine, my fit bit, and my iphone all come up with different numbers for the calories burned.

Pick one method/estimate that seems reasonable, stick with it consistently and adjust calorie balance based on actual results over time.

What machine or what exercise will determine which method is most likely to be "reasonable".

Think ahead to maintenance, you will have to account for exercise then so why not practice those skills now?

sijomial wrote: »

snowflake930 wrote: »

Honest question, if you are eating all of your exercise calories back, how do you calculate for sure how many calories you burned. The exercise machine, my fit bit, and my iphone all come up with different numbers for the calories burned.

Pick one method/estimate that seems reasonable, stick with it consistently and adjust calorie balance based on actual results over time.

What machine or what exercise will determine which method is most likely to be "reasonable".

Think ahead to maintenance, you will have to account for exercise then so why not practice those skills now?

I am in maintenance. Have been for over two years. When I gain (over 5# fluctuation) I eat less calories until I am back down.

snowflake930 wrote: »

Honest question, if you are eating all of your exercise calories back, how do you calculate for sure how many calories you burned. The exercise machine, my fit bit, and my iphone all come up with different numbers for the calories burned.

My honest answer is that I very carefully weighed all the data sources I could find, did some reading, and used a HRM for quite a while (until it broke.) I then came up with answers that are lowball estimates for each activity I commonly do and subtract 2 kcal/min to obtain a net burn from the gross estimates. When I do an careful accounting of my weight trends and calorie consumption and burn, I'm satisfied that my estimates are pretty good.

If I don't eat my exercise calories, and even sometimes when I do, I find that my workouts suffer. I can't imagine not eating them - I'd barely have the energy to get up in the morning!

mean_and_lean wrote: »

Nuke_64 wrote: »

Yes. If you burn a reasonable amount, you are putting yourself in a higher than expected deficit. Encouraging people not to eat back exercise calories could be encouraging a VLCD, depending on their normal calorie goal. As there are a lot of women hear shooting for 1200 calories and men, 1500, that would include a lot of people.

How do you know your calorie burn is actually accurate? That is the whole reason why I don't eat back my exercise calories.

Just like your food logging - absolute accuracy isn't necessary.
But you can guarantee zero isn't a good estimate!
For some exercise it's really easy to be pretty accurate, for others much harder.

Not usually, just because I like to go over my calories on weekends when I go out more, so I try to kind of bank those calories. I don't necessarily need or want those calories on the day I earn them.