Food Diary

Mfp calculates your goal as if you do no exercise. So if you eat your goal number and do not do any exercise you will lose weight. If you do exercise then that will increase your deficit so mfp gives you those calories to eat so that you will be at your original deficit. I don't know why it looks different on the app vs the pc. One shows Goal - food eaten + exercise = amount remaining. The other shows your goal and then shows (Food - exercise = net) and amount remaining. The amount remaining is the Goal - the Net. On the app it subtracts the amount eaten from your goal and then adds exercise. On the pc it subtracts the exercise from the amount eaten and then subtracts that number from the goal. You get the same thing and I agree it is confusing for someone who looks at both. What you basically need to know is if you got your goal from mfp then you should be eating back at least a portion of your exercise calories. A good rule of thumb is to start with eating back 50% and reevaluate after about 4 weeks. If you lose faster than expected then you can eat more of your exercise calories and if you lose slower than expected you know your exercise calories are overestimated and you should eat less of them.

Correct, your exercise calories will vary, and will be whatever you logged as your calorie burn. This means that you will be eating different amounts of food on different days, but you will be netting approximately the same each day.

Example:
Day 1 - no exercise
Goal: 1,400 net calories
Eat 1,400 - 0 exercise = net 1,400

Day 2 - exercise and burn 500 calories
Goal: 1,400 net calories
Eat 1,900 calories - burn 500 calories = net 1,400

You ate more calories on Day 2, but both days netted the same total calories. The net goal is what you are aiming to hit.

Again, many people find that the estimated calories burned for exercise can be too high, and so they choose to only eat back a portion of their exercise calories. This is just the nature of the beast, in that everything we do here, in the end, is an estimate, and this gives a little wiggle room for estimation errors (either underestimating how much we ate or overestimating how much we burned)

lizcharles2860 wrote: »

Thank you kgirlhart.
I partially understand what you're saying. basically eat my goal and half of my exercise?
But shouldn't my exercise number vary every day?

Yes. Eat your goal plus half the exercise. After a few weeks you may realize that you can eat more than half. The exercise calories should vary from day to day as your exercise varies. Where are you getting the numbers for exercise calories? If you are entering in the same workout for the same amount of time then that may explain why you are getting the same number.