Do you eat your workout calories ?
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Heck yeah! Food so yummy!0
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Yes, I eat back all of my exercise calories. I tried eating only half, as per the usual recommendation around here, but was losing weight too quickly that way. I'm a cyclist, and it seems that the calorie estimate from my Garmin is fairly accurate, or at least closer to the truth than the MFP database estimates. Makes sense, since it uses GPS to track my speed, distance, and elevation gain, knows my weight and the weight of the bike, and tracks my heart rate.0
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NorthCascades wrote: »NorthCascades wrote: »
Me too. Eating exercise calories incentivized exercise for me.
This is one of those times I wish I could mark a post awesome and insightful at the same time.
For me, it's a little like the tortoise and the hair; slow and steady wins the race. Having the best body you can doesn't mean depriving yourself for a horrible week and then celebrating without regaining your weight back, it's a process, and anything we can do to make it easier and smoother and more enjoyable, is something we're doing to stick with it in the long term.
Aw, shucks.
I'm not sure why this doesn't resonate with more people, actually. To me it was like a magic bullet - I get more exercise and I get to eat more food that I like. Win-win.
And IPAs...
I gotta work for my IPAs...3 -
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Had some crackers with goat cheese as a morning snack. One of my coworkers came over and told me he's jealous that my activity level allows me to do stuff like this without gaining weight. I've put 75 miles on my bike in the last 3 days.2
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I do my best not to then again I'm being aggressive in my weight loss goals.0
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When I have an intense cardio workout day, I'll routinely burn 700+ calories, so I usually try to eat back 85-90% of the calories I burned. I know that if I didn't I'd be left with a lot of calories at the end of the day and would feel starving. The 10-15% wiggle room helps with any calorie count inconsistencies.0
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Is that not the point of working out ?1
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I personally don't but I'm maintaining and not trying to lose. I do however go back to my regular calories even if I go out to eat and don't know the exact amount of calories I've consumed. It's working since, with the exception of pregnancy, I've maintained my weight for 18 years. I think you should experiment if you're unsure. Try eating them back and see how the weight loss goes.0
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Is that not the point of working out ?
Last night I needed to go to the store, but I didn't want to drive and deal with parking. So I took my bike. The point of exercising was transportation. A happy side effect is that instead of having to put gas in my car, I had to put food in my belly.
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That's a fine aphorism. It's great if it works for you.
By contrast, if I were told early on in the process that I shouldn't eat my exercise calories, I would likely have become discouraged. I would have been dissatisfied with my calorie budget, and I wouldn't have bothered to exercise very much.
Being able to eat the food that I like is a stronger motivator to me that hazy notions of strength and fitness. I am exercising more than I ever have, I'm in the best shape of my life, and I've maintained my 50 lbs lost for 5 years running, at least partly because I explicitly use food and beer as a motivation for exercise.3 -
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I think it really also depends on how much you've exercised. If you burn 150-200 extra calories a day I'd probably not eat those back and just take the bigger deficit. If I was active all day and got myself an extra 500 I'd probably eat 1/2 back just to avoid a binge if you're consistently too low on net cals. Even using the TDEE method I can sometimes have really high days where I 'earn' calories and i know from experience that eating at least some of those is better long term.0
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The point of working out is to create a bigger calorie deficet. If you eat those additional calories, you are essentially working out for nothing.
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mrssie1223 wrote: »The point of working out is to create a bigger calorie deficet. If you eat those additional calories, you are essentially working out for nothing.
Ummm the point of working out for me is to increase cardiovascular health, endurance, muscle strength and body composition. I don't consider those things "nothing". Increase in caloric deficit is a bonus to me.
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I sometimes eat them back, it depends if I'm hungry and its nice that on the days I do fancy some chocolate I know I can have some without feeling "guilty".
Since I reduced my daily calorie goal to the MFP recommendation of 1280 I've been losing a steady 1lb a week and thats with eating back some of my workout calories. 1lb might not sound a lot but I'm losing inches too and I can feel it in my clothes.
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Yeah, I eat after riding or running to refuel.0
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I do as much as possible. I think SOME entries are inaccurate but running and walking I have been able to eat back 100% of calories without any impact on weight loss or, now, maintenance. Obviously this does depend on you being able to measure how fast you were walking/running but that's fairly easy to do with the huge number of free apps that are available (I use Runkeeper).
If you are serious about improving performance with something like running, in my experience you have to fuel it. My pace has improved by about 30 seconds/km since I moved into maintenance and I feel much more able to push myself. If I hadn't been eating those calories back while in a deficit, god knows how terrible I would have felt!
The exercise calories I take with a pinch of salt are strength training, circuit training/aerobics and yoga. I log them and eat 100% of what I log, but I go for the "light effort" options and only plug in time actually spent exercising, not rest periods.0 -
Always. It's one of the main reasons why I exercise - for the extra calories.1
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