Eating Back Step Calories

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  • nelja
    nelja Posts: 282 Member
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    Thank you for all the views and advise
  • nelja
    nelja Posts: 282 Member
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    I have decided to only eat back a fifth of my steps. Because my vivo smart do over estimate my calories a bit. Just so that I do not eat too much. I will see how it goes for a week or two.
  • mlinci
    mlinci Posts: 403 Member
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    For a slightly different view: of course I eat (most of) my step calories back.
    I’m a 42 year old 5’5 woman now maintaining a weight of 137-139 lbs.
    My activity setting is set to sedentary, but I very consistently walk 11-12k steps a day on average. It’s my only exercise.
    MFP calculates my sedentary maintenance calories at 1620 per day. I get about 350-450 Fitbit calories a day for my walking. I eat pretty much all of them. And I’ve been maintaining my weight successfully for over half a year now.

    As I have said before, I wouldn’t last a day on as little as 1200 calories. In fact I lost close to 50 lbs never going below 1600 calories (but it took me a year and a half).
  • nelja
    nelja Posts: 282 Member
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    Thank you for sharing. I am 5" and weigh 121 (55kg) .And 1200 is very little for me. I am hungry the whole time. I am 47 years old. I used to walk about 8k steps a day, but have now increased it to 10-11k a day. And then I cycle 2-3 times a week. But those calories I eat back. My vivo smart gives me +- 1700 calories per day. And that is definitely not correct. That is why I divide it by 5.Then it is about the same as yours, about 350. Which makes more sense to me. Because my cycling, for roughly a hour I get 400-500 and that is way more effort as walking.

    I have been stuck on the same weight for about 3 months by not eating back anything, but I will rather now see how it goes when I do eat back some of it.
    mlinci wrote: »
    For a slightly different view: of course I eat (most of) my step calories back.
    I’m a 42 year old 5’5 woman now maintaining a weight of 137-139 lbs.
    My activity setting is set to sedentary, but I very consistently walk 11-12k steps a day on average. It’s my only exercise.
    MFP calculates my sedentary maintenance calories at 1620 per day. I get about 350-450 Fitbit calories a day for my walking. I eat pretty much all of them. And I’ve been maintaining my weight successfully for over half a year now.

    As I have said before, I wouldn’t last a day on as little as 1200 calories. In fact I lost close to 50 lbs never going below 1600 calories (but it took me a year and a half).

  • megs_1985
    megs_1985 Posts: 199 Member
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    I actually stopped tracking my exercise and steps in MFP. I calculated my TDEE with light activity and just input that as my calorie goal. TDEE includes your activity so no need to put in exercise on the app plus exercise calories can vary widely and not be very accurate. I eat about 1550 calories a day no matter what exercise I do that day. Of course if I stop exercising I lower it to about 1400.
  • nelja
    nelja Posts: 282 Member
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    That also could work
    megs_1985 wrote: »
    I actually stopped tracking my exercise and steps in MFP. I calculated my TDEE with light activity and just input that as my calorie goal. TDEE includes your activity so no need to put in exercise on the app plus exercise calories can vary widely and not be very accurate. I eat about 1550 calories a day no matter what exercise I do that day. Of course if I stop exercising I lower it to about 1400.

  • NorthCascades
    NorthCascades Posts: 10,968 Member
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    @nelja

    You're a cyclist. You understand why it can be hard to know how many calories you burned on a ride. Maybe you were going fast because you put a lot of energy into the pedals, maybe it was because you had a tail wind. Maybe you were drafting another cyclist.

    Walking doesn't have those variables. If you walked a mile, you walked a mile. You can't coast while walking. Wind can change the amount of effort but only slightly without wheels.

    As a result, it's pretty easy to reliably come up with a useful calorie estimate for walking, if you know the distance.
  • coba
    coba Posts: 7 Member
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    Sorry if this has already been answered
    I’m trying to look through the thread and find it
    I am just wondering how to have my steps (exercise) shown in my diary dashboard but not have my calories be adjusted for it
    like I’m set to 1400 cal and my exercise might be 400 so it puts me at 1800 cal to eat I don’t want to eat that much I want to stick with my 1400
    I put in sedentary and I’m only doing about 8000 steps a day now ( I’ve just started walking on the treadmill 3.5 mph for a half hour) so I don’t think I need to eat back those calories it just confuses me sometimes......🙃
  • heybales
    heybales Posts: 18,842 Member
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    coba wrote: »
    Sorry if this has already been answered
    I’m trying to look through the thread and find it
    I am just wondering how to have my steps (exercise) shown in my diary dashboard but not have my calories be adjusted for it
    like I’m set to 1400 cal and my exercise might be 400 so it puts me at 1800 cal to eat I don’t want to eat that much I want to stick with my 1400
    I put in sedentary and I’m only doing about 8000 steps a day now ( I’ve just started walking on the treadmill 3.5 mph for a half hour) so I don’t think I need to eat back those calories it just confuses me sometimes......🙃

    I'd suggest understand the system then so it doesn't confuse you, because you aren't sedentary with that many steps no matter the distance.
    Sedentary would be usually below 4k steps. That is just getting out of Lightly-Active into Active even.

    If you aren't going to learn to use a tool correctly, at the least you may get poor results using it - at the worst you could hurt yourself.

    If you already told MFP you wanted to lose weight, your eating goal of 1400 already includes that fact, but with being sedentary. Which you aren't.
    If you are doing more, you are creating bigger deficit (which could already be unreasonable, unknown), which may not bite you now, but it could make your diet extreme and more prone to the 80% failure rate people have getting or maintaining goal weight.

    Don't be a common bad statistic and do it again next year, faster isn't better, use the system correctly and get more from the tool.

    If using a different system that you didn't mention besides not understanding MFP, might mention it.

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