Eating back calories burned
elleclaydon
Posts: 1 Member
Hi everyone, I am a little confused. I am aiming to maintain my current body weight. My daily calories taking into account my active lifestyle has been calculated by MFP as 1600. I train at the gym 6 x per week, each session consisting of 15mins HIIT and about 40 mins of weight training. I imagine i do burn a significant amount of calories each week through exercising. Should i be eating back these calories or does MFP take these calories burned into consideration when calculating my daily calorie allowance? I want to be eating enough to maintain my weight and not lose anymore. Thanks.
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You definitely need to account for your exercise calories. If you don't you will be creating a deficit and will continue to lose weight. MFP is designed so that your activity level only includes your daily activity from life and your job. Your exercise is only logged when and if you do it. Then MFP gives you more calories to eat. If you are including your exercise as part of your daily activity then you do not want to log it again and eat those calories. That is using a TDEE method when MFP uses the NEAT method. So if you set your activity on MFP including your workouts then do not eat back any exercise calories because you are already accounting for them. If your activity level does not include your intentional exercise then you add that and eat those calories back.2
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elleclaydon wrote: »Hi everyone, I am a little confused. I am aiming to maintain my current body weight. My daily calories taking into account my active lifestyle has been calculated by MFP as 1600. I train at the gym 6 x per week, each session consisting of 15mins HIIT and about 40 mins of weight training. I imagine i do burn a significant amount of calories each week through exercising. Should i be eating back these calories or does MFP take these calories burned into consideration when calculating my daily calorie allowance? I want to be eating enough to maintain my weight and not lose anymore. Thanks.
It depends on what you set your activity level at with MFP. You will note that the descriptors make no mention of exercise for your activity level...only your day to day. The way MFP is designed is for you to set an activity level before any deliberate exercise and thus exercise IS NOT accounted for in your activity level which is why you log it and earn additional calories after the fact.
If you are including exercise in your activity level then you aren't using MFP as designed and logging and eating back exercise calories would be double dipping.0 -
Thanks for posting that Tinkerbellang83, I've finally got my TDEE at last! I've used so many online calculators, all with really differing results. I'll stick with this one now 👍😊0
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I've been told by 2 nutritionist not to count the app it gives for excercise as it's inaccurate
There are ways to more accurately determine you energy expenditure. Some people use an arbitrary % to eat back...you should fuel your fitness, particularly if you're doing a lot. If I go out on a 30 mile bike ride I will burn in the neighborhood of 1,000 calories. I do that fairly regularly most weekends...if I didn't account for that I would be in trouble.5 -
elleclaydon wrote: »Hi everyone, I am a little confused. I am aiming to maintain my current body weight. My daily calories taking into account my active lifestyle has been calculated by MFP as 1600. I train at the gym 6 x per week, each session consisting of 15mins HIIT and about 40 mins of weight training. I imagine i do burn a significant amount of calories each week through exercising. Should i be eating back these calories or does MFP take these calories burned into consideration when calculating my daily calorie allowance? I want to be eating enough to maintain my weight and not lose anymore. Thanks.
Ref the bolded - no your activity setting explicitly excludes purposeful exercise.
The daily goal you get is for a non-exercise day only.0 -
I've been told by 2 nutritionist not to count the app it gives for excercise as it's inaccurate
Sounds like these nutritionists don’t really understand how MFP works and any professional worth their salt should have alternative ways to assess the accuracy of these estimates.
But think about it - do you think exercise burns calories? Even if you aren’t sure if it’s 50, 100, or 1000 - there’s only one number that’s definitively wrong and that’s 0. So why would you take the advice of two professionals who are telling you to use the most wrong number that exists?5 -
I wear a Garmin vivoactive HR which syncs everything with Myfitnesspal. I'm very pleased with the results and after 6 months of use I have not had any problem maintaining my weight. But I admit, my weight loss goal was only 8 lbs. My primary goal was to gain as much muscle as a 60 year-old woman could.2
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The way I understand stand the calorie intake is MFP goes by how active you say you are. So I would not eat back any calories that you burn as that is expected.7
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Liftingat58 wrote: »The way I understand stand the calorie intake is MFP goes by how active you say you are. So I would not eat back any calories that you burn as that is expected.
@Liftingat58
Activity means job and lifestyle only - it has nothing to do with exercise.
Go and look at your goal set up and you will see the activity choices make no mention at all of exercise.4 -
I generally agree with everything said, however MFP will adjust your calories on top of your activity level only after you go over the "threshold" the system has identified for it (assuming it is measurable linear steps exercise such as walking, running, biking - but not spinning- etc).
If I adjust my calories to sedentary with a base line of 1200 calories the system will usually give me at least 700 extra exercise calories (based on my fitbit input). If I set my activity as active with a base of 1660 it will give me about 300 calories, thus getting to the same result.
I think it's very important to point that the possibility of "double dipping" depends on the type of activity you are trying to measure, especially since it's really difficult to accurately factor in weight training (which I also do at least 4x/week - and I personally don't count in my calories allowance).
I often read that the most accurate way of measuring non step exercise is through a HR device, which will pick up your increased heart beat even if you aren't moving much (but won't distinguish between you lifting and you being stressed!) ..so again, it's a bit of a tricky matter. I think what works best is to rely on your own personal "gut" feeling in adjusting your calories, practice makes perfect ;-)3 -
I generally agree with everything said, however MFP will adjust your calories on top of your activity level only after you go over the "threshold" the system has identified for it (assuming it is measurable linear steps exercise such as walking, running, biking - but not spinning- etc).
If I adjust my calories to sedentary with a base line of 1200 calories the system will usually give me at least 700 extra exercise calories (based on my fitbit input). If I set my activity as active with a base of 1660 it will give me about 300 calories, thus getting to the same result.
I think it's very important to point that the possibility of "double dipping" depends on the type of activity you are trying to measure, especially since it's really difficult to accurately factor in weight training (which I also do at least 4x/week - and I personally don't count in my calories allowance).
I often read that the most accurate way of measuring non step exercise is through a HR device, which will pick up your increased heart beat even if you aren't moving much (but won't distinguish between you lifting and you being stressed!) ..so again, it's a bit of a tricky matter. I think what works best is to rely on your own personal "gut" feeling in adjusting your calories, practice makes perfect ;-)
MFP only does the auto adjustments if you have a tracker synced to it. Many people who do not have to manually log exercise and decide how accurate those estimated are for themselves.6 -
@elleclaydon, Eat what you eat, and do what you do. If your weight stays the same you're good to go. If your weight goes down, eat a little bit more. As hard as it is to lose weight, I doubt you'll waste away anytime soon.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67USKg3w_E4
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