Should I treat long exercise the same as shorter exercise for calories?

wilsonunc wrote: »

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I am fine with regular weigh ins thankfully. I'm mostly just trying to not beat myself up for overeating and feel like I need to run or exercise or whatever to burn calories. I think I have a hard time determining if I feel fatigued after running because I just ran a whole bunch and I need to hydrate or if I need to eat more. I think the majority of this weight gain I have had was due to overeating while marathon training. Then I stopped training and still continued to eat the same, lol. However I will say that I feel about the same after a long run now as I did then! So I'm not sure.

It is interesting with your stats! I assume the 1700 to maintain is including exercise calories, or you are listing your activity level as something other than sedentary? I list mine as sedentary because I'm a grad student, so other than my runs, I don't do a whole lot of movement.
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IME, the fatigue from underfueling is not as much a "right after exercise" effect, as a creeping cumulative fatigue, that could be more deeply felt with exercise, but is more general. YMMV. (I accidentally underate when I first started calorie counting, for reasons that will become obvious later in this post.) If you have a solid calorie estimate for your exercise - as you seem to - I'd eat it all back, either the day of, or spread out in some other way you choose.

The rest of this is an tangent, but I hope it's OK:

A thing to be aware of, with really slow loss (which I agree would be the best idea in your case, since you don't have a lot to lose, and you have athletic/fitness goals you want to adequately fuel): With really slow loss, the scale can be a misleading guide, for surprisingly long periods of time. If not counting, calm and patience, plus a long time horizon, are useful tools. The tolerances are small, calorie-wise. (NOTE: I'm not suggesting you need to count precisely, I'm responding to the circumstance that you don't wish to!)

Think of it this way: Many of us have routine fluctuations (from water weight and disgestive contents) of at least 1-2 pounds, and many people see wider swings (common in premenopausal women). Those show up most clearly on the scale when maintaining weight, because bodyfat level is fairly consistent, and the day-to-day changes are water/digestive contents.

When you start losing half a pound a week, it can easily take a month or more for that fat loss to very clearly outpace the random fluctuations, and show you a real fat loss *trend*. It's a good thing to be mentally prepared for that.

A weight trending app (or a personal tracking spreadsheet) might help you better visualize the trend, but even those may give misleading results for several weeks, depending on the trend-length you're tracking, even with daily weigh-in data, in context of the actual loss rate, your routine fluctuation magnitudes, etc.

On the plus side, it's pretty painless to lose at a slow rate.

Background: I've been losing super slowly - slower than half a pound a week - for about the past year, to lose some vanity pounds. It's been great, like I said, painless: Eating satisfyingly, easy to fit in my essential nutrition, no sacrifice in athletic performance or energy level. But there have been whole months where even my weight-trending app thought I was gaining/maintaining, when I knew (because I *do* calorie count pretty precisely) that I was on a track to continue the slow loss . . . and eventually, it did show up on the scale. I'm down around 12 pounds over the last year, as context. The effects won't be as dramatic at half a pound a week (twice my effective rate), but some of the same ideas apply.

As an aside, don't over-rely on other people's experiential estimates of *their* needs, for *your* calorie goals. Every individual differs - in statistical terms, they may fall anywhere on the population bell curve. You don't know whether they have average calorie needs, vs. unusually low or high needs. The difference potentially can be hundreds of calories (low hundreds, typically). You are better off using an estimate from MFP or a TDEE calculator (like https://www.sailrabbit.com/bmr/), because they're at least effectively giving you something in the big central zone of the bell curve, loosely a value close to the common (mean) calorie need for people similar to you in height, weight, age, etc. Start from there, adjust based on experience with your own body.

As background on that: I'm 5'5", 125 pounds this morning, age 65, and have been losing as described above on 1850 net calories, with some well over goal days thrown in occasionally. Most days - because I eat estimated exercise calories back when I do the workout, normally - my gross calorie goal (and intake) has been 2000-2200 or so. I am at most at the border of sedentary and lightly active, outside of exercise, in terms of countable things like steps (average < 5000). There are other women my size and age maintaining on something closer to 1500 net (actually that's more common, since I'm mysteriously a good li'l ol' calorie burner, based on 5 years logging experience), and some require even less than that. Many women my size/age, if they relied on my goal, would *gain* weight at the level that results in loss for me.

Best wishes!