Exercise calories - on or off?

courtpete21 wrote: »

I keep going back and forth, on or off? Looking forward to your experiences. Thx!

If you turn it off then you should be accounting for exercise activity in your activity level. If you have it on you should only have your activity level set to whatever your day to day hum drum is and log exercise separately and get additional calories to account for that activity.

One way or the other, you should account for that activity.

Mine is on. I set mine up as sedentary for my activity level and eat back all my exercise calories. Since MFP is setup for you add your exercise calorie burns to the calories it gives you to lose weight, I would under eat if I did not.

If you don't have a good average estimate for your usual exercise calories, then I would leave it enabled and estimate exercise as well as possible for at least a while. For me, at least, dancing (which accounts for a sizable amount of my 'cardio') is kind of annoying to regularly log (tallying how many dances of what approximate tempo, typical song length, etc) - I did that for a while until I had a fairly consistent average and then switched to TDEE using a number that took that average into consideration.

On.

1. Weight loss is maintenance training and practice, and you'll have to figure out full fueling eventually.

2. I do enough exercise, on an irregular/unpredictable enough schedule, that I'd have crashed and burned during weight loss if I hadn't eaten those calories - potentially either by overeating and failing to lose during reduced activity, or undereating and failing to thrive during more activity. (I actually did undereat briefly but by underestimating my base calorie needs, and it was Not Pleasant.)

I ate pretty much all of my exercise calories while losing 50+ pounds in less than a year.

People with a moderate (not maximum) calorie deficit, and a moderate exercise schedule, may be able to afford not eating back any exercise, and stay healthy. With heavy exercise or a big deficit on the eating side, it's too big a health risk.

This all assumes one is using the MFP NEAT + exercise approach, rather than TDEE. With unpredictable exercise, NEAT + exercise works best for me.

I don't use MFP to track, so moot for me.

I use IIFYM and include my exercise and spread it evenly over the week. I MUCH prefer eating in the same range every day, rather than having a massive difference between days when I workout and days when I don't (my current workouts burn more than a typical meal's worth of calories for me, so it's a pretty big difference).

I've tried the other way (the MFP default method) and it just didn't work well for me - unless I wasn't working out LOL.