Calories and working out

loki334 wrote: »

glovepuppet wrote: »

Aps tend to overestimate what you've been burning, so a lot of people eat back half.
I don't eat them back, but set my activity level higher to cover exercise.
Some people feel drained if they don't eat them all back.
Trial and error is probably the best way to decide.

Good luck!

That probably would be best. Takes a long time, but worth it. I manually log my calories from the treadmill, but I leave out the weight lifting and yoga. I guess that would be a safety net? But then they say if you under est your body wont let lose of the fat. Driving me nuts lol.

The bolded bit simply isn’t true. ‘They’ say a lot of things, many of which are not fact.

If you undereat according to the calorie target you set you’ll lose weight faster but not necessarily in a healthy way. The best way to figure out if you need to eat your exercise calories is to experiment over the course of several weeks. Unless you’re desperately hungry it’s a good starting point to eat back half of the calories you ‘earn’ through exercise and see how that impacts your weekly loss target. If you’ve set MFP to lose a pound a week, for example, and by eating half of your exercise calories you’re on target for a pound per week after a few weeks of doing this, you’ve found your level.

If, however, you’re not losing as expected you could drop the percentage of exercise calories you eat, and vice versa...if you’re losing more than you expected, eat a bit more of those ‘bonus’ calories.

MFP works off of the NEAT method which is non exercise activity thermogenesis. Simply put the calorie target provided is based off your stats and activity level but doesn’t include exercise. When you do exercise, you are meant to log and eat back those calories to avoid having too large of a deficit, to fuel your exercise, etc.

Some people find the exercise calorie burns overinflated so they start with eating back a portion of the calories until they get a handle on the impact on their overall weight loss trend.

Read the stickied most helpful forum posts in the getting started section they have a ton of useful info about how to best use the site and set appropriate goals.