Recent article on myfitnesspal

I think the danger lies in getting stuck in the mentality of "I exercised, so I can eat whatever I want". Generally, it's very difficult to exercise enough to make up for poor food choices. Try thinking of exercise as a tool to help with weight loss and use nutritious foods and reasonable portions to fuel your exercise.

I looked up the article, because the few times I've read an MFP article/blog/whatever the heck they're called on here, I actually haven't agreed with them.

I think you're latching onto one thing in that article rather than the larger picture. It just mentioned that a Vox article looked at studies saying that counting calories from exercise will sabotage your weight loss. Now, I'm not going to look at those studies to see what the context of that statement is. Did you? Maybe it would clarify things for you.

What I will say is that if I didn't count my calories from exercise and accurately account for my activity level, I would really be under eating. I chose sedentary on MFP because I have a kind-of desk job. However, with intentional non-exercise movement throughout the day, most work days I am much more active than sedentary. Then I add exercise on top of that. I can't adequately fuel all of that on a sedentary setting with no adjustments (I use a Fitbit and allow that to adjust my calories as necessary).

I think most of the fault lies with the user. Many people don't lose when eating back exercise calories because they don't weigh their food and they're eating more than they think or they overestimate their activity level and log all exercise on top of the extra calories they get based on their activity level. We all know that the calorie burns in the MFP database are overinflated for the most part. That being said, I've seen people log things like "Cleaning, 60 minutes, 800 calories burned" or "Cooking, food prep, 90 minutes, 450 calories burned". As ridiculous as those numbers are and ignoring the flaws of the exercise database to begin with, you have to question the logic of anyone who accepts those numbers as reality. "Well, MFP says it so it must be true!" If it were that easy to burn off so many calories, people would not be overweight to begin with.

Regarding the calories earned from fitness trackers, while there is a margin of error to consider, I've seen people claim they are so far off the mark but the same people have acknowledged that they did things like eating back calories from steps they know they earned by driving just because their fitness tracker said they could do so. That's inane and of course will produce little, if any, results. You have to analyze the data and adjust or else you're not going to make progress at all. You can't expect a fitness tracker to do everything for you just like you can't expect it to be 100% accurate. That's just not how technology, or the body, works.

I'm always nervous for new users when I see posts like this because a year ago when I started, I was one of the 1200 calorie people who tried everything NOT to eat back exercise calories as I would read conflicting information and didn't know any better. I'm 5'3" and started at 139 pounds which is right at the brink of being overweight. For my first two months, I lost a total of 18 pounds and was pulling an average of 2.2 pound losses per week. After those first two months, I noticed my performance suffering when I went for runs and I was suffering from insomnia but I kept pushing on. Then one day I just could not get out of bed no matter what I did. I probably slept for a total of 20 hours that day and all I could do was eat. I went to the boards and searched up similar situations. I read, read, and read some more and took the advice of eating back at least 50% of my exercise calories. My sleep improved, my run time increased, and I just felt better. Now I'm 112 pounds and enjoying eating back most of my exercise calories. It disturbs me to know that back then I passed up on so much good food out of fear of gaining weight, eating 1200 calories at 139 pounds, and now at 112 pounds, I'm over here maintaining at 2000+ calories.

In conclusion, eat back some exercise calories. Unless you truly know your activity level, start at sedentary or even lightly active. If you do not use a food scale, my suggestion would be to start with 25 % if you're using MFP's database or 50% if you're using a fitness tracker. If you do use a food scale for everything, I suggest 50% using the MFP database and 75% using a fitness tracker. Be patient and give it a few weeks, especially if you're a woman as we hold water during certain parts of the month. Pay attention to your intake and after 30 days look at your information as a whole. If you're losing at a faster rate than expected, eat more exercise calories. I know it's tempting to lose faster, but faster is not always better. You should aim for no more than 1% of your body weight per week. If you're losing slower than expected, then decrease the amount of exercise calories you eat back. The one caveat to this is that if you already have less to lose and you put in two or even one pound per week, you may hit that 1200 for women/1500 for men wall that MFP refuses to go below, so in cases like that you can't expect a two pound loss per week if eating 1200 calories only gives you a 500 calorie deficit per day. Cross reference MFP's info with another BMR/TDEE calculator and do the math.