What do you do with your exercise calories?

julie_jhiro wrote: »

I've been doing MFP on and off for the last several (10?) years. I've also belonged to WW in the past where activity/exercise calories allow for more food for the day. I have a few questions...

1. Do you eat your exercise calories? If so, how has it affected your weight loss?
2. Do you think the exercise calories are inflated? (It seems that a walk with my dogs or yoga would normally not burn that many calories.)

Thanks for your thoughts!

When I was using MFP I ate back my exercise calories and lost weight at the rate that I selected when I set up because that's how this tool is designed. Later on I switched to the TDEE method which incorporates exercise into your activity level so you get a higher calorie target from the start.

As to whether they're inflated, it depends on what you're using to determine that...walking and running are easily determined with formulas. For other steady state cardiovascular activities I used my HRM and deducted my basal calories and that was good enough...you're never going to be 100% accurate and you don't have to be.

Personally, I probably wouldn't worry about walking my dog and exercise calories unless it was a hell of a walk...the higher the intensity and longer the duration of exercise, the more important it is to fuel it. I walk my dog pretty much every morning for about 1.5 miles...I burn around 85 calories for that, so not really anything to fuss over and well within the realm of logging error, etc.

On a 30 mile bike ride however, I'll burn in the neighborhood of 900 calories...not accounting for that would be pretty bad.

While MFP's calorie estimates are estimates (not gospel) they're pretty much always closer to accurate than assuming zero calories are burned during exercise, which is 100% inaccurate.

If you have a very slow target weight loss rate, a fair amount to lose, and not very much exercise, it can be OK not to eat back the exercise calories - to let them increase your calorie deficit and allow you to lose weight a bit faster.

If you have a very aggressive target weight loss rate (that 2 pounds a week thing for sure, but sometimes even a lower rate is aggressive), or have very little weight to lose (10-20 pounds or less), or have a lot of exercise (long duration and/or high intensity) then it can be a very bad, very unhealthy idea not to eat back at least some exercise calories.

Why? Because losing too fast is not a healthy thing to do: It risks losing unnecessarily large amounts of lean tissue alongside fat, can result in things like hair loss, saps energy from your daily activities (through fatigue, dragging through life, sleeping/resting more, etc.) and reduces your overall daily calorie burn, among other things.

Personally, I estimated my exercise calories carefully**, then ate back nearly all of them while losing about 1/3 of my body weight in around a year. I've continued to do the same thing in maintenance (now in year 3 at a healthy weight).

Are the exercise calories inflated? I assume you mean the MFP database exercise calories. Some, I suspect, are more accurate than others.

** When I say "estimated carefully", I mean that when I was starting out, I'd look for multiple sources of estimates for activities I was going to do regularly. This included the estimate (not a measurement!) from my heart rate monitor, my Concept 2 rowing machine, the MFP database, and other online calculators or apps (especially the specialized ones for some activities, from reasonably responsible/respected sources, that incorporate more or more specific data points than with MFP (like walking/biking calculators that consider terrain and distance, for example)). Most of the time, I'd pick the low source to use.

I'm careful with eating my exercise calories back. While heart rate monitors and associated algorithms are the most accurate, there is still a wide margin of error associated with these calculations. I drive most of my calories through running, biking, and swimming. I track steps and eat back a minimum as if I was walking. If I workout unusually intense, then I add 10-20% to this and focus on protein and carbs, but my concern is preserving and developing muscle mass.