Should I Eat the 2,000 calories it says?!

i would just eat if your hungry or try high calorie food. dont force yourself to eat

visit mcdonalds and then hit baskin robbins on the way home

Seriously though ... just do what you can, don't overeat just to cover the calories.

I'd say to treat yourself with something that's higher in calories that you don't usually have. If you completely omit foods from your diet, especially when you can feasibly fit them within your calorie intake range for the day, you'll just be depriving yourself. Just don't go overboard. There's no shame in having a small fry, a half a cup of ice cream, or some really good chocolate now and then! You have to feed your food soul, too!

I burn 1200 calories in my step cardio pump class, the night of that class I have a treat or something for dinner I wouldn't usually have, but I never eat back all the 1200 cals, I just don't want that much and feel if I'm not hungry, I'm not going to force myself.

this is just a thought, but our bodies are made to tell us how much food it needs to survive. For so many years we have been starving in and confusing it. the concept of calories in v. calories out is an excellent theory and logical and because we have been overeating and not exercising for so long, our bodies have become confused about how to deal with calories and needed training.

So now with the help of mfp, we train our bodies that it can depend on us to feed it enough to survive and perform regular activities on a regular basis, and we maintain a good weight. We have successfully retrained our sagging metabolisms. I would think that now that it is working properly again, it will have a built in meter of what it needs to survive, and would tell you need to consume more food because of increased exercise by making you feel hungry. It then tells us we have had enough, because we have learned to eat proper, good food, and to stop when we are satisfied (note I say satisfied, not full :happy: ). I am a firm believer in eating all of your calories, plus your exercise calories for the most part, to give your body the nutrition and energy it needs.

Your body is resiliant and meant to deal with increased energy exertion by telling you to eat more or less. It was confused because for so long we ate food, including a lot of bad food, simply for the enjoyment not because we were listening to our bodies, sometimes in fact we were ignoring it and putting more food in than it wanted or needed, pr not putting enough in when it asked it, but now we are on the right road and have trained it to work properly again.

I am thinking of an athlete. One that is really in shape and has a high metabolism. They don't count every calorie as obsessively as we do (I don't think) and they eat healthy, balanced meals and snacks and extra when they are hungry or work harder, but not calorie for calorie. Sometimes your body is meant to exert more engergy than it expends I think, it is just natural.

So if I burned an extra 1200 today in exercise, I don't know that I would insist that I eat all of them, if I had already consumed a healthy amount. I would certainly eat more because I would be hungrier, but it doesn't seem logical to me to force myself to eat all of them if I am not hungry?

Just wondering how others feel? I know probably opened a whole can of worms here, but wondering if it ever gets to a point that calories in don't balance with calories out???

this is just a thought, but our bodies are made to tell us how much food it needs to survive. For so many years we have been starving in and confusing it. the concept of calories in v. calories out is an excellent theory and logical and because we have been overeating and not exercising for so long, our bodies have become confused about how to deal with calories and needed training.

So now with the help of mfp, we train our bodies that it can depend on us to feed it enough to survive and perform regular activities on a regular basis, and we maintain a good weight. We have successfully retrained our sagging metabolisms. I would think that now that it is working properly again, it will have a built in meter of what it needs to survive, and would tell you need to consume more food because of increased exercise by making you feel hungry. It then tells us we have had enough, because we have learned to eat proper, good food, and to stop when we are satisfied (note I say satisfied, not full :happy: ). I am a firm believer in eating all of your calories, plus your exercise calories for the most part, to give your body the nutrition and energy it needs.

Your body is resiliant and meant to deal with increased energy exertion by telling you to eat more or less. It was confused because for so long we ate food, including a lot of bad food, simply for the enjoyment not because we were listening to our bodies, sometimes in fact we were ignoring it and putting more food in than it wanted or needed, pr not putting enough in when it asked it, but now we are on the right road and have trained it to work properly again.

I am thinking of an athlete. One that is really in shape and has a high metabolism. They don't count every calorie as obsessively as we do (I don't think) and they eat healthy, balanced meals and snacks and extra when they are hungry or work harder, but not calorie for calorie. Sometimes your body is meant to exert more engergy than it expends I think, it is just natural.

So if I burned an extra 1200 today in exercise, I don't know that I would insist that I eat all of them, if I had already consumed a healthy amount. I would certainly eat more because I would be hungrier, but it doesn't seem logical to me to force myself to eat all of them if I am not hungry?

Just wondering how others feel? I know probably opened a whole can of worms here, but wondering if it ever gets to a point that calories in don't balance with calories out???

Hunger is too complex to just mean "you haven't eaten enough calories." Physical feelings of hunger seem to be caused by many things, and while it looks like the amount of body fat is one, it isn't the whole picture. If that were the case, anorexics would be hungry, and morbidly obese would always be full. Often the opposite is true.

As far as the athlete analogy...that really depends on the athlete. Michael Phelps counts calories, macro and micronutrients, what foods work before competition, what supplements increase his lap time by .02 seconds, etc. A college athlete might eat total crap because they don't have a sports nutritionist and no one has told them any better--and they never make it to the Olympics. Nutrition plays a huge role in performance, so high-end athletes do monitor it. No matter how hard you train or how strong you are, if your glycogen stores are low or you're anemic, you're not going to perform.

At this level, no, we don't have to monitor things that closely. But I rarely support eating based on physical feelings of hunger or satiety. It's important to stick with one number for a long enough duration to determine whether or not it works.