Calories

adicorn1389
adicorn1389 Posts: 4 Member
edited August 2020 in Food and Nutrition
Im trying to lose weight, I've been doing cardio like boxing & strength training 4 times a week, I'm allowed 1400 cal. My question is when you enter your exercises in, it calculates calories burned, do I eat the calories I've burned or only eat the 1400 ?? Ive always been confused 🤔

Replies

  • sijomial
    sijomial Posts: 19,811 Member
    edited August 2020
    Your calorie goal is 1400 + exercise calories, it really is as simple as that.

    What exactly do you find confusing?

    Here's a link to the help guide on how this app works if you haven't already seen it...
    https://support.myfitnesspal.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032626011-How-does-MyFitnessPal-work-
  • dewd2
    dewd2 Posts: 2,449 Member
    edited August 2020
    Yes, you eat them but keep in mind that often times they are overestimated. I suggest starting by eating 1/2 to 2/3 of the calories back for a couple weeks and see how you are progressing. Then adjust up or down if you're not losing as expected.
  • blue_eyed_fi
    blue_eyed_fi Posts: 24 Member
    I never eat all my exercise calories as it doesn't work for me. My allowance is 1200 a say plus exercise...i eat at most 50% of my exercise calories. Im 49 now so finding i need less calories than I did years ago
  • TeaBea
    TeaBea Posts: 14,517 Member
    I never eat all my exercise calories as it doesn't work for me. My allowance is 1200 a say plus exercise...i eat at most 50% of my exercise calories. Im 49 now so finding i need less calories than I did years ago

    The problem is there are lots of estimations.....it's not your age that's the driving factor here.

    Calorie burns are estimates. Logging calories in are estimates, sure we all want to believe our logging is spot on but many of us aren't. Activity level is a range.....not just one number. If 50% works for you that's great, but some will find 100% works for them.
  • whoami67
    whoami67 Posts: 297 Member
    You're supposed to eat them. I recommend eating them. If you find you're not losing weight, then cut them back to 2/3 or half. But why not start out eating as much as you can so you have something to cut back on when you get smaller?
  • dewd2
    dewd2 Posts: 2,449 Member
    edited August 2020
    TeaBea wrote: »
    I never eat all my exercise calories as it doesn't work for me. My allowance is 1200 a say plus exercise...i eat at most 50% of my exercise calories. Im 49 now so finding i need less calories than I did years ago

    The problem is there are lots of estimations.....it's not your age that's the driving factor here.

    Calorie burns are estimates. Logging calories in are estimates, sure we all want to believe our logging is spot on but many of us aren't. Activity level is a range.....not just one number. If 50% works for you that's great, but some will find 100% works for them.

    This. I eat 100% of my calories back (and sometimes more :D ). It took some adjusting at first but I now have Garmin and MFP working together almost perfectly. If you take the time to figure out what works for you MFP will pretty much put you on autopilot. Just log and the results will follow.
  • dewd2
    dewd2 Posts: 2,449 Member
    I just wanted to add this bit of advice. There's no need to eat all of the calories on the day you burn them. YOu could eat some of them today and more tomorrow or the next day. Don't think of this as a daily goal but rather a weekly or even longer goal. For example, after my race last Saturday I had an extra 3700 calories to eat. No way I could I do that (not even close after running 50k with my stomach in knots). I made up for it over the next couple days. At the end of the week I was in just a small deficit.
  • sijomial
    sijomial Posts: 19,811 Member
    I never eat all my exercise calories as it doesn't work for me. My allowance is 1200 a say plus exercise...i eat at most 50% of my exercise calories. Im 49 now so finding i need less calories than I did years ago

    And I eat all my exercise calories as the vast majority of them (c. 145,000 per year from cycling) are estimated accurately. If I only ate 50% I'd be wasting away.

    At age 60 I need more calories than when I was younger as I have more time for both exercise and keeping my activity level high.
  • RockingWithLJ
    RockingWithLJ Posts: 243 Member
    edited August 2020
    I set my calories 300 higher than i normally would have so i know im eating some calories from exercise back. Before i had a watch that read my heart rate it was hard for me to know how much i was truly burning. I still feel like that because there are times my watch will say im at 60bpm when my heart is pounding out of my chest so i never changed it.
    1400 is low for your body to even completely it's daily functions without exercise so please eat them back, even if it is just a recovery shake..
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 31,717 Member
    I estimated my exercise calories carefully, then ate them back 100% all through nearly a year of weight loss, from obese to healthy, and for 4+ years of successful weight maintenance since. (If it matters, I'm a 5'5" woman, now age 64 and 127.6 pounds this morning.) Sijomial's right: Once we reach maintenance, we need to eat those calories, or we'll keep losing weight. Practice in doing that can be helpful.

    The key thing, IMO, is managing your actual weight loss rate in a sensible range. Pick a sensible calorie estimating method, one that doesn't strive for unreasonably fast loss (for sure less that 1% of current body weight weekly, unless morbidly obese *and* under close medical supervision for nutritional deficiency), or within maybe 40-ish pound of goal weight (in which case slower is likely to be better, but details matter at that point).

    Follow that method for 4-6 weeks (whole menstrual cycle if premenopausal, so you can compare weight at the same relative point in at least two different menstrual cycles).

    If you got your calorie goal from MFP guided setup, and set y our activity per instructions (based on pre-exercise activity), you should definitely be eating back a fair chunk of exercise calories.

    Once you have that several weeks of personal experiential data, you can adjust your eating level based on average weekly loss over that period. This process works pretty well, for most people.

    Too-slow loss can be frustrating, but too-fast loss can cause unnecessary health risk. I know which of those directions I'd prefer to err in, if I'm going to be wrong.

    Hunger for sure is not a reliable guide. When I first joined MFP, I underate accidentally** for a period of time, wasn't hungry, and felt great . . . until suddenly, I didn't. I got weak and fatigued, and it took several weeks to get back to normal, even though I adjusted quickly. No one wants that, right? (** It happened because MFP dramatically underestimates my calorie needs for some reason, not because I was *trying* to do something dramatically inappropriate.)

    Best wishes!