3 reasons you may gain eating your exercise calories

So I have seen lately a lot of people saying that they tried their goal set on MFP, and ate their exercise calories and they either maintained or gained weight. I wanted to offer up some real, hard to face reasons for why people will temporarilly gain weight while following a goal AND eating their exercise calories. Make no mistake, it takes longer to lose weight when you do it this way, but it is easier to maintain in the long run, and raises your chance of success in the long term.

1) You set the wrong goal for youself. Not everyone has the same percentage of body fat, the higher the body fat, the greater the deficit can be and still work for you. And forget the idea that you can accurately calculate body fat by plugging in numbers on a site. Without a trained professional or a machine that does it (hydrostatic, DEXA), you will only be able to calculate a very rough estimate of it. Everyone thinks they set the goal they want. But the only real way to know is to do research. Take a few hours, go online, and research what you really want to do. Look for reputable sources, look for multiple answers from nutritionally trained professionals (most MD's receive VERY little nutritional training in college, make sure they have taken additional training classes in nutrition before turning to them).

2) Your body chemistry was out of whack. It can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months for the body's metabolism to return to an efficient state, during that process, it goes through changes in make up, when those changes happen, many times, you can gain up to 15 or 20 lbs. DON'T LET THIS DISCOURAGE YOU. Even though you are now exercising and eating more nutritious foods, it takes a while for your metabolism to ramp back up, while the metabolism is still working slowly, you can be packing on weight, But remember, your metabolism is "learning" that you are going to consistently treat your body better, and eventually, if you keep feeding it right, it will speed up enough to burn what you are consuming. If you DON'T eat enough, your body will assume that you are just increasing activity without giving it more fuel, which means many functions in your body will still be diminished, which, while causing you to lose short term pounds, does not lead to overall health and eventually will lead to gaining back the weight in most cases.

3) You really do have some kind of medical condition. There are actual conditions that slow down the metabolism, lots of them in fact, most are relatively rare. In many cases, lack of proper nutrition can slow the endocrin system's hormone release and slow down the metabolism. Fortunately your endocrin system is very robust and will usually return to normal function relatively quickly if given proper nutrition, exercise, and sleep. If you are doing these things, and have seen a nutritionist and/or a certified trainer with no sucess for a period of 3 months or more, it might be a good idea to see an endocrinologist to confirm normal glandular function.

I'm not preaching here guys, I know that every person is different. I just hope that everyone is open-minded enough to analyze themself and see if they are actually doing right by their body. I know that I have done 180's while on this site, and have had my eyes opened on more then one occation. And of course there are always the exceptions that prove the rule. I hope this helps you guys. I'm not always right, and often wrong to my own embarrassment, but such is life, I live with it, learn from it, and move on.

-Banks

Question of the HRM - I've heard people who deduct calories from what their monitor shows - is that the right thing to do?

Polar doesn't deduct your normal metabolic rate, which is usually somewhere around 80 to 150 calories per hour or so (that greatly depends on your maintenance calories), so in Polar's case, I subtract about 65 cals per 1/2 hour.

That has absolutely nothing to do with my goals being unrealistic because I would actually have to weigh about 30 pounds more than I do to get my BMR/AMR up to a place where I could create anything close to a 500 calorie-a-day deficit through diet alone. I don't think anybody would think is necessary for somebody who is 40-50 pounds overweight (as I would be if I were to gain 30 pounds) to take their weight loss down below one pound a week, yet that is what I would be doing if I were at that weight and continued to eat all of my exercise calories.

I'm not sure I follow your logic here. if your AMR is 1500 and your BMR is 1200, and you shoot for say a 1/2 lb a week weight loss (just guessing here), that's 250 calorie deficit a day. Eating back your exercise calories keeps you at a 250 calorie deficit a day. I don't see what you are trying to get at, can you maybe explain a little more on this?

OK, well now I think I understand.

See when you create a goal in this site, it automatically creates a deficit for you (without any thought to exercise).

So if you already have a deficit, then don't eat your exercise calories you are EXPANDING that deficit. I'm sorry if you misunderstood, but I have no problem with creating a deficit via exercise, in fact, that's GREAT!

The point I'm trying to get across is that if you create a deficit for your daily calories, then add to that deficit by not eating back your exercise calories, then you risk creating too large of a deficit.

I was only talking about 250 calories because of what you said about your AMR/BMR difference. If you're close to your goal (I.E. have low Body Fat %), or little to lose, trying to lose a pound a week is very difficult because the body doesn't have many places to pull fat stores from, and will start canabalizing lean tissue. If you want to create a larger deficit by exercising, that's fine, but I just wanted people to be aware, that how ever you create it, the body needs a certain amount of calories, and creating a 1 lb deficit may or may not be too much for you (that's a matter of experimentation to see where your thresholds are) depending on how much adipose (body) fat and intramuscular fat you have.

See when you create a goal in this site, it automatically creates a deficit for you (without any thought to exercise).

I think we agree now.

But I think it is important to note that MFPs deficit, because it doesn't take into consideration exercise, may not be the ONLY safe deficit a person can create. I love the way MFP works, by the way, so I'm not criticizing MFP at all. But for somebody in my shoes, when I say (as an example), that I want to lose 1 pound a week (which I did when I started here because I had 23 pounds to lose), MFP could only calculate a deficit through diet for me that had me losing 1/2 lb a week.

I think it is important to note that that isn't the ONLY answer to that equation because I very easily, without harming myself, could lose 1 lb a week very safely if I don't eat all of my exercise calories.

For those concerned about why they may be gaining weight eating their exercise calories (or simply not losing weight), I think it is important to recognize, in addition to what you've listed in your first post, the reasoning behind MFPs numbers so each person can determine if they can create a safe and healthy deficit that DOES take into consideration exercise.

I totally agree with you regarding the difficulties when a person gets close to their weight loss goals and how this needs to be looked at differently. But, again, when I had nearly 25 pounds to lose, I truly believe that creating a calorie of deficit of 500 calories a day through a combination of diet and exercise would be considered by many to be completely safe. Just because MFP couldn't do that through their caloric calculations doesn't mean I needed to have limited myself to losing 1/2 lb a week.

True enough, I can't disagree with anything on here. I'm glad we could hammer through that. :happy: