"It's too hard to eat exercise calories back"

I honestly don't want to eat enough peanut butter to take care of a 1000-1500 calorie deficit. I try to make them up best I can, I do. But after awhile, eating more really just makes me feel sick. Sometimes, I can make great headway. Other times, no.

And, for the record, I have never been overweight, nor underweight in my adult years. My body seems to get along just fine.

The small deficits, 300-500 calories, I have no problem eating. It's just my long run,

My metabolism is fast, so my maintenance calories are 1720. On a short workout, I'm eating 2000 calories. On a long workout day, I can burn 1000-1500. I'm 5'2" and about 112. Seriously, my body is not ready yet to efficiently process over 3000 calories for one day. It's just not.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,403803,00.html

michael phelp's body can handle 12,000 a day, so i think you will be alright =]

That story has long since been disproved, actually.

Hmmm. Maybe their stomachs have shrank? That DOES tend to happen with weight loss.

Or maybe they have a hard time eating more HEALTHY calories.

Sure, it's easy to eat back your 300 calorie burn by grabbing a twix, but some people have learned to care about the nutritional value of their food.

Don't judge what you don't know.

i'm not judging. I just find it annoying that's all =] !

I find recurring threads criticizing other people's decisions with THEIR bodies annoying. That's all. [:

Food fight!!!!!

I see your point most definitely. Over eating (and drinking) definitely wasn't a challenge for me and it's still something I have to watch out for. Just like most people (and I'm only assuming) I love food! I love to COOK yummy food! And I didn't believe it could be true that you could genuinely lose your appetite or just not feel like eating remaining calories (whether you still needed carbs, protein, or fat or a ratio of all of them) after a day of legitimately clean eating and a healthy amount of exercise. I mean, I love food, but I know that to lose weight and be healthy, I can't fill a calorie deficit with food that has no or very little nutritional value like sweets, butter, alcohol, etc. I mean, in all honesty, if I tried to fill a 200 calorie deficit in my daily intake with something like celery... I would be hard pressed to finish all that celery! That's just a proportionally large volume of food for the few calories they provide per gram. So, no, I don't believe those individuals (although there may be some...) that make the claims of uneatable leftover calories of which you speak aren't facing a legitimate problem that sometimes occurs when you're trying to put only healthy and nutrient rich foods into your body.

In my defense, as I say this in my head but never aloud, it's difficult for me to eat my calories back without going way over everything else (check out my diary today and see).

I get pretty disgusted with myself when I go over sodium

I see your point most definitely. Over eating (and drinking) definitely wasn't a challenge for me and it's still something I have to watch out for. Just like most people (and I'm only assuming) I love food! I love to COOK yummy food! And I didn't believe it could be true that you could genuinely lose your appetite or just not feel like eating remaining calories (whether you still needed carbs, protein, or fat or a ratio of all of them) after a day of legitimately clean eating and a healthy amount of exercise. I mean, I love food, but I know that to lose weight and be healthy, I can't fill a calorie deficit with food that has no or very little nutritional value like sweets, butter, alcohol, etc. I mean, in all honesty, if I tried to fill a 200 calorie deficit in my daily intake with something like celery... I would be hard pressed to finish all that celery! That's just a proportionally large volume of food for the few calories they provide per gram. So, no, I don't believe those individuals (although there may be some...) that make the claims of uneatable leftover calories of which you speak aren't facing a legitimate problem that sometimes occurs when you're trying to put only healthy and nutrient rich foods into your body.

If you a specific number of the micronutrients and a specific number of the macronutrients and your diet is taking you over on calories while failing to provide all micronutrients you need to eat more micronutrient dense food and less calorie dense food.

If you have the opposite problem of consuming so much micronutrient dense food, going well over the amount required by the body, that you have no room for calories from macronutrients, you need to include some more calorie dense foods in your diet.

Health isn't just about maximising vitamins and minimising calories, it's about getting enough of everything you need, including calories.

i know, lol! i will never have a hard time not eating.

i can understand where people are coming from. when you first start mfp you want to succeed and try really hard so you follow all the rules and you do kind of have to think about why you need to eat your extra exercise calories or try to.

i'm glad we have a community where we can ask questions and learn so much. i love mfp!

Well, some people might be like me who ate too LITTLE before. I was constantly under eating and that's why I gained weight, because my body was holding onto everything that went into my mouth! So for people like me, it was hard adjusting to eating 1200 or more calories per day. I literally had to stretch my stomach out a bit.

And you actually lost weight by eating more than you did before? I find that so hard to understand... I mean, thermodynamics and that, if you don't get enough energy, your body HAS to use your fat stores. How can you get fat by undereating?

I found the whole "you have to EAT to lose weight" thing a bit confusing when I first started out, but I had a really smart friend who studies biochemistry (and likewise nutrition and how the body uses it) explain it to me and it started to make sense. I found this analogy helpful: Take a wood chipper for example. Now I'm no expert on how those things work, but let's assume for the sake of argument (and the analogy) that I do. A wood chipper's job is to take huge logs and process them by shredding them into mulch or even saw dust. Little tiny particles that apparently (let's assume) have some greater purpose as a smaller particle of their original whole. Now, put lots of wood at one time into that wood chipper i.e. over eating. It gets backlogged and fails to chip any wood. The wood remains as a log and doesn't get processed for a better purpose. Put one log in at a time, and the machine works very efficiently. Put no logs in at ALL (not eating what your body needs just to sustain life) and the machine grinds for forever looking for a log to chew up and eventually burns up and won't chip wood anymore. If the wood chipper doesn't receive logs and only one log at a time, it shuts down and doesn't process those logs anymore.

Your metabolism (and I use that term loosely--the body's process of taking the food you eat and processing it into a smaller form so all of the cells and organs in your body can utilize it) works exactly like the wood chipper. If you put more food into it than it needs at a time (one day, for example) than it can process, it can't process everything and ends up storing most of it. That's how we can weight. We take in more calories than our body actually needs. When we exercise, we burn calories and if we don't replace them, we do the exact opposite of over eating that causes similar results. Our body will produce what I call a negative feedback and STOP processing food and burning calories. It does this because the body is now in starvation mode and is trying to conserve what little energy it has left to survive and that means only burning enough to run bodily functions essential to life while storing the rest as fat (think of fat as energy reserves in your cells). If you keep your body in starvation mode long enough, it will eventually begin to start burning your reserves and you will initially lose weight, but your body will do what it needs to to survive, which means shutting down your metabolism altogether (we're talking getting to the point of absolute starvation, not just a few days without eating enough). Occasionally not eating back 100-200 exercise calories because you legitimately have no appetite is one thing. If that happens regularly, then something needs to change such as eating more and probably working out a little less.

So it is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL to NEVER put your body even remotely into starvation mode when you are trying to lose weight. The calorie deficit that we strive for daily i.e. only eating 1200 or 1400 calories, depending on your basal metabolic rate and your regular daily activity aside from deliberate exercise, is basically striking a balance between feeding your body what it needs to maintain your current weight and depriving it just enough to force it to adapt to a lower caloric intake. A smaller body needs fewer calories, hence losing weight.

Sorry for going into a long speech about that, and I don't mean to brow beat anyone. I'm absolutely no expert, but after doing my homework and being taken to school by someone who knows what they're talking about, I know that knowledge of how our body uses the fuels we put into it and how to choose the fuels that provide the most nutritional value per gram is the key to success that we are all looking for here.

I'm one of those who NEVER eats back their exercise cals. I want my weight loss to be quicker. When I am ready to maintain, I will then make this adjustment. I aim for 1100, since I am sure I underestimate something over the day, this gets me to my 1200. I don't eat after 5 or 6pm ever and I rarely have cheat days or days off of the gym.

I see your point most definitely. Over eating (and drinking) definitely wasn't a challenge for me and it's still something I have to watch out for. Just like most people (and I'm only assuming) I love food! I love to COOK yummy food! And I didn't believe it could be true that you could genuinely lose your appetite or just not feel like eating remaining calories (whether you still needed carbs, protein, or fat or a ratio of all of them) after a day of legitimately clean eating and a healthy amount of exercise. I mean, I love food, but I know that to lose weight and be healthy, I can't fill a calorie deficit with food that has no or very little nutritional value like sweets, butter, alcohol, etc. I mean, in all honesty, if I tried to fill a 200 calorie deficit in my daily intake with something like celery... I would be hard pressed to finish all that celery! That's just a proportionally large volume of food for the few calories they provide per gram. So, no, I don't believe those individuals (although there may be some...) that make the claims of uneatable leftover calories of which you speak aren't facing a legitimate problem that sometimes occurs when you're trying to put only healthy and nutrient rich foods into your body.

If you a specific number of the micronutrients and a specific number of the macronutrients and your diet is taking you over on calories while failing to provide all micronutrients you need to eat more micronutrient dense food and less calorie dense food.

If you have the opposite problem of consuming so much micronutrient dense food, going well over the amount required by the body, that you have no room for calories from macronutrients, you need to include some more calorie dense foods in your diet.

Health isn't just about maximising vitamins and minimising calories, it's about getting enough of everything you need, including calories.

I think my post may have been misleading. When I talked about "nutrients" I was kinda simultaneously referring to both carbs/fats/proteins as well as vitamins and minerals. In fact, even with really healthy eating, it's still a good idea to take a daily vitamin supplement just in case you aren't getting all the nutrients your body needs from food alone.

While there are certainly days when I am in a mood where I can decimate my calorie goal in a single sitting there is definitely a change that happens over time. Things that I would have easily eaten even 3 months ago often make me feel unwell or fill me up before I finish or both.

I am not complaining about this...I am actually comforted by it. Today I decided at 630 pm to ride my bike what ended up being 25 miles. There is no way I am making up those 1000 cals completely after 930. Most days I can make them up but that doesn't make it easy even for a fatty like me.