Exercise calories

If you tell MFP you want to lose weight when you set up your goals, you are given a goal that puts you at your desired deficit BEFORE any exercise is done. If you increase the size of that deficit through additional intentional exercise, you can eat those calories back.

So if your goal is 2,000 a day and you burn an additional 1,000 calories that day, you can eat 3,000 and still be at your original goal.

The trick is to ensure that your estimate of calories burnt is relatively accurately. 1,000 would be a pretty hefty amount of exercise for a lot of people. Depending on how you estimate it, it could be an over-estimate. For this reason, some people start with just eating back a portion of their exercise calories (say, 50-75%), observe their results over a few weeks, and then make adjustments based on their real-life results (so if you're losing faster than expected, you can begin eating back more of the calories and if you're losing slower than expected, you can eat back fewer).

13Mart10 wrote: »

Iv always been pretty confused by eating back calories burnt. For example if I’m in a caloric deficit and my caloric goal is to hit 2000Kcal on this deficit and I then burn 1000kcal through exercise that day, is my caloric goal intake for that day then 3000kcal to make up for calories lost through exercise?

You dont have to eat them back if you set your caloric intake to include them. For the loss i want to see i should set mine to roughly 1500 but instead i set it to 1850 knowing ill burn at least 350 since i workout hard for an hour 6 days a week.
Mine doesnt log into mfp for that very reason tho

janejellyroll wrote: »

RockingWithLJ wrote: »

13Mart10 wrote: »

Iv always been pretty confused by eating back calories burnt. For example if I’m in a caloric deficit and my caloric goal is to hit 2000Kcal on this deficit and I then burn 1000kcal through exercise that day, is my caloric goal intake for that day then 3000kcal to make up for calories lost through exercise?

You dont have to eat them back if you set your caloric intake to include them. For the loss i want to see i should set mine to roughly 1500 but instead i set it to 1850 knowing ill burn at least 350 since i workout hard for an hour 6 days a week.
Mine doesnt log into mfp for that very reason tho

With your method, you're still eating them back -- you're just manually setting a goal to ensure you're getting them upfront at the beginning of the day. It's a different path to the same destination.

Agreed. And the flip side to getting them up front is that if you don't exercise that day or don't exercise for as long or at the same intensity, you'd still be aiming to eat the same number of calories as the day before but didn't actually earn as much.