Should I eat exercise calories???

Of course you should. You should eat weekend calories, too.

EDIT: Exercise is like driving your car. Calories are like gasoline. When you drive your car, you have to put more fuel in it. When you use your body, the same thing applies.

healthy snack* lol.

Frankly, I don't know why you wouldn't eat exercise calories. Like North said, your body needs the fuel!

Here is my plan, I am a diabetic so I am a carb counter mainly. 130g a day (roughly 1,200 calories)...unless I earn them after I hit 10,000 steps a day. So yes, I will celebrate with a few extra carbs (or calories) but only after I hit a minimum of 10,000 steps. This is because moving my body is so important to controlling my diabetes. Four 15 minute walks a day spread throughout the day (typically 1st thing in the morning and after each meal) is an hour's worth of walking and not so hard to achieve.

I don't ever eat back my exercise calories. I'm just not that hungry when I exercise at least 45 minutes to an hour a day. However, when I don't exercise, I get very hungry. I've gained nearly 15 pounds since losing 35 because of that. The game starts again.

i don't eat my exercise calories. They are a bonus to me. I do eat an Aussie Bodies protein bar after exercise though and count it

And are you measuring your burn by your own heart rate monitor or the machine, or mfp's estimate

Yes, just make sure you are not over estimating your exercise calories. For reference, I only burn about 60-70 calories per mile walked.

I also eat back only a portion of my exercise calories. For example, for 60 minutes on the treadmill, the equipment says I burned about 400 calories, while MFP says it's almost 1000. I'll eat the 400, maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less, depending on how hungry I am, but not the full 1000. If I'm eating 1000 extra calories then I'm probably also not eating healthy foods.

tennileb wrote: »

And are you measuring your burn by your own heart rate monitor or the machine, or mfp's estimate

For the record, there are a lot of ways to come up with a number for how many calories you've burned. You just mentioned two of them.

(1) For walking, you can just do the math. On flat ground, take your body weight in pounds, divide by 3, and that's pretty close to how many calories you've burned. Your heart rate doesn't really offer much insight into how much energy it takes to move a certain weight a certain distance. This is how Fitbits work, a lot of them don't even have HRMs and people swear by their accuracy.

(2) For cycling, you can use a power meter to measure your energy use, like how a scale measures your weight instead of estimating it. A direct force power meter is basically the gospel truth.

(3) METs tables. Doing whatever exercise at whatever intensity burns X calories per hour at your weight. I don't like this approach at all because it's subjective and difficult to tell what intensity you're supposed to put down. A lot of people use this approach and do well with it.

Etc.

Anyway, there are 3,500 calories in a pound of fat. And it's pounds of fat we're all trying to lose. If you log the exercise you do and the food you eat, over time you'll be able to gauge the accuracy of your numbers. Because your deficit predicts how fast you should be losing weight. You have to use a moving average of your weight because you don't lose it in a clean, linear pattern, but once you have some data, it becomes pretty easy to go back and check if you want to.

I don't eat my exercise calories. I've worked out how to eat nutritionally dense foods within my calorie limit and so I'm not hungry for more calories. However a day a week I'll eat more than my calorie allowance by adding some extra carbs like brown rice and some chocolate. I think each person is different and if you can lose weight eating your exercise calories then go and enjoy it!

I do not , but I eat wee less on days I don't weight train and more on days I do, I also care about the macros, humm so many options T_T