Eating calories burned

WinoGelato · May 2019

Clarisse_McClellan wrote: »

It depends on you and how you're trying to lose. I think MFP's calorie recommendations are off for me, so I've figured out my calorie needs before exercise using the Mifflin-St. Jeor formula and am trying to eat 3500 fewer calories for one pound loss per week. I like to exercise, but I don't like to depend on it for any weight loss, because I can't guarantee that I'll be able to work out a given number of days per week. (I'm a homeschooling, SAHM.) I get maybe 800 calories from exercise a week, so that might be an extra pound a month. I don't think it's significant enough to worry about right now.

If I felt hungrier from the exercise, which I don't usually, I might eat up to half the estimated exercise calories back but no more, because it's hard to know how many calories you're really burning. Even a Fitbit isn't completely accurate, because it's based solely off your heart rate. If you want accurate calorie burn you need to use one of those breathing masks & instrumentation that measure actual oxygen consumption. And let's face it. That would be pretty annoying.

Whether you can accurately pinpoint your calorie burn using a variety of estimating tools that are available or not - there is one number that is definitely wrong and that’s zero. The exercise you do burns more than zero calories, right? So why would you choose and recommend the only number that is certainly wrong?

No one is saying that MFP Numbers are perfectly accurate as is. Many people have to monitor and adjust, dialing in on whether the original estimate from MFP for NEAT is high or low (for me it’s low) and then how accurate their logging is (are you using a food scale?) and then finding an exercise estimate they feel is reasonable for themselves. Again, MFP was low for me when I was just logging “walking, 30 min, slow pace” but when I got my FItBit I realized I was burning considerably more calories than calculators were predicting.

You’ve adjusted the MFP methodology because it’s off by a certain factor for you , but that doesn’t mean it needs to be blanketly dismissed for OP or for everyone.

Eating calories burned

Replies

Categories