Eating back excerise

MFP is designed so that your calorie goal is before exercise: so yes you can choose to 'eat them back'.

What is your weight loss set to? 1 pound per week? 2 pounds per week? If you're set to the max of 2 pounds per week and your logging is accurate, then you already have a 1000 calorie deficit daily before exercise. That is fairly extreme. If your goal is to lose only .5-1 pounds per week however, your deficit is set to 250-500 and that is less extreme. IMO its more important to eat more (to cover exercise) if you're already at the 2 pounds per week deficit.

Are the steps part of your daily routine or actual deliberate exercise? Activity level is based on your day to day routine, the deliberate exercise (walking or running, etc.) is seperate. If your steps are part of your work, then raise the level of activity but don't enter it as exercise. If the steps are because you are running or walking, then set your level of activity to your non-exercise routine and enter the exercise and eat back some or all of those calories. Be careful not to double dip or you won't lose weight. i.e. I am mostly sedentary, but I do about two hours of exercise a day, for an average of 17000 steps. On MFP I eat to my sedentary activity level, plus the calories I burn with exercise. On the days I don't exercise, I eat less. If I listed myself as active or very active, I wouldn't eat back any of my exercise calories, because they would be included in that Active setting.

natashasomerville87 wrote: »

Hi its set to 1.5lbs per week however i only had my activity level as active but thinking it should be very active with the steps im doing each day

If you included the steps in your activity level, MFP gives you those calories up front. You don't want to log them and eat them back because that is double-dipping -- you'd be eating the calories twice.

MFP intends for your activity level to reflect your activity BEFORE intentional exercise and for you to log your exercise and eat those calories back. If you choose to include your exercise in your activity level, then don't log it.

How much weight do you need / want to lose? If it's between 1-20lbs, your goal should be 0.5lb a week. If it's 20-40lbs, then you can aim to lose 1lb a week. 1.5lb a week is only really suitable if you're trying to lose more than 40lbs.


Double check your Activity level too. Sedentary (or whatever the lowest one is called these days) assumes you do around 3,500 steps a day. The next one up would cover 5,000 steps through normal day-to-day activity. On the days that you do that 15,000 step walk, you'd then add your intentional exercise to give you additional calories (which you should eat). If you do that amount of walking every day, you could just set your Activity level to Very Active and not link your fitbit.

Whichever method you choose, you don't want to be double counting your walk. Also, be aware that the bathroom scales will go up and down - give it 6 weeks of consistency and accurate logging to see whether you are losing at the intended rate.

It definitely sounds like you're not eating enough if you've been losing weight at more than 1lb a week with so little to lose.

With less than 20lb to lose you should have your Goal set to lose 0.5lb a week. If you have it set to anything higher than this, that's too aggressive and is not good for your overall health, hormones and likelihood of maintaining your weight loss long term. Then, see above re your Activity level vs tracking your exercise. It doesn't matter which way you do it, but don't double count.

Make sure you're eating your exercise cals though. Your NET cals (food intake less exercise burned) should equate to the number of cals that MFP has given you. Don't eat less than that. It's far better to lose weight slowly and safely.

natashasomerville87 wrote: »

So i go for big walks making up about 15000 of those steps the rest is day to day i also do 30 min weight session 3 times a week but i dont add that onto mfp but i track my steps and excerise through my linked fitbit
Ive up my calories to 1710 as 1500 didn't seem enough ideally i want to lose min of 1lb a week but im a healthy BMI its more for my own comfort

5,000 steps as part of your non-exercise daily routine would put you at the very least into the lightly active category on MFP. The rest of the walking time should be added back as exercise calories. How much of them you add back will be determined by the method you are using to get them and experience. For me personally, I use the MFP database and 75% of my exercise calories; some people only use 50% but others find that 100% is accurate. Same thing applies to importing from a fitness tracker - you'll have to see what works best for you and how accurate your tracker is. You can start with adding back a portion and keeping an eye on your loss rate over 4-6 weeks or even 8 weeks; adjust as necessarily after that period of time to get to the loss rate you are trying to maintain.

Also note that a 0.5 lb/wk rate is 250 calorie deficit, so you will have to be spot on in your tracking. And with only 9 lbs to lose, you really do need to do it slowly as your body doesn't have a lot of reserves to pull from, as others above have pointed out. IT will take a lot of patience because water weight can easily mask your progress; trending apps help immensely here because you need to look at your long term loss over a period of weeks to see your true progress.

^^^ I'm set to Sedentary and just log / track everything on top of that.

Maybe not clear, but a key point of my post above is to log / track consistently for 6 weeks and then see how you're doing / what rate you're actually losing at, averaged over 6 weeks.