eating exercise calories

I eat back all my exercise calories and have lost at the expected rate for over a year. That is with accurate logging of both food and exercise. A sprint triathlon usually came in around 900 calories, so 700/day 6 days per week does sound high. What kind of exercises are you doing? Some devices and machines will overestimate.

That being said, 2 lbs/week is too fast for your current/goal weight. You should be focused on .5/week or slower (if weight loss at all - how tall are you?) I assume you are shorter based on goal weight which will change things as well. You don’t want to eat less than 1200 calories, bare minimum for a female. Too few calories will take its toll on your body... you might feel fine right now, but eventually you will crash and it can be dangerous when you do (long term damage to your body, including your heart).

thearianadiaz wrote: »

i’m a 19 yr. female and weigh about 106 pounds, i’ve recently started going to the gym 6 days a week burning around 700 calories a day. i set my goal on mfp to lose 2 pounds per week to get back to 100 pounds. the only reason i burn so many calories is so i can eat whatever i want and still be in a calorie deficit. does this approach work, or am i actually gaining weight unknowingly?

Unlike some of the others, I think in your very specific case, losing 2 pounds a week for a mere three weeks would probably not be majorly life or health threatening, for an active 19-year-old.

But y'know what? It's still a bad idea. You're setting yourself up for a lifespan of crazy yo-yo dieting, and that will lead to a bad place.

It's one of the least healthful ways to lead life (worse health-wise than staying somewhat overweight, according to the statistics). It's likely to lead, cumulatively, to losing unnecessarily large amounts of muscle mass. It also increases chances of short- and long-term adaptive thermogenesis (loosely, training your body to get along on fewer calories because it anticipates more future periods of famine, which is how it sees a huge calorie deficit). The muscle mass shrinkage, plus the adaptive thermogenesis, over a period of time, will mean that every time you go on one of those "lose weight fast" crazes, you'll need to eat fewer and fewer calories to lose weight. In between, the same phenomenon will make regain just that tiny bit faster/bigger, every time.

Don't do it.

You're young. You're healthy. Be smart, too.

Figure out how to eat in a healthy and calorie-appropriate way to maintain your weight in a healthy range (+/- a few pounds). Use exercise to increase your muscle mass (it will make you cuter, I promise), which is a gradual thing but very rewarding. Find fun cardiovascular exercise that fits into your life well (leaving enough time/energy for other important life goals, like friendship, education, career-building, family, other well-rounded hobbies, etc.). Cardiovascular exercise helps keep you healthy, plus vibrant looking long term. Yeah, it will also let you eat a little more, and still maintain a healthy weight.

That kind of approach is a path to thriving. Don't pick the restrict/let-loose merry-go-round instead.

Life balance. Find it. It's important.

And for the love of all that is rational, give your long-term future self a bit of love and consideration. She needs you to find a healthy, balanced lifestyle and habits, or *her* life will be *much* more miserable.

I'm 65 years old. I have any number of same-age friends who went merrily down the path you're describing. Most of them are now obese, needing multiple drugs (with side effects and bad interactions) for metabolic conditions, they're not able to do quite a range of daily life tasks (the harder but routine yard/garden and household work) so need to pay or depend on others, they can't eat/drink what they want (at all, ever, without getting sick) because of their health conditions, they can't do fun things like art/music festivals or stadium events because too much walking or too many stairs, they need more surgeries and have more illnesses (and recover from them more slowly, with more complications), and more.

My same-age friends who've been long-term active/fit and in a healthy weight range don't have those problems. They can do what they want, they can eat/drink what they want (balancing things out over time), are in MUCH better day to day health, with less struggle, more happiness.

You may think you won't live that long. I thought that, but here I am. You may think you won't end up in that bad way from your choices now. Don't count on it . . .

. . . make it so by making good choices now. Please.

thearianadiaz wrote: »

i go for about an hour, 3.5 mph with the incline set at 15

Wow, so this treadmill is likely the winner for the biggest overstated calories of the year. If you were walking 3.5 miles out in nature you'd maybe get 150 calories. So the good news is that you're not starving yourself. That's a relief. Other than that, please do listen to what AnnP and Sjoimal said.

^ that.

Sorry to say, you are not burning 700 calories on a treadmill in an hour at 3.5 mph. A lot of people fall for those inflated machine numbers. Don't fall for it.

the formula is: NET calories burned = watts/hr * 3.6

Moderately brisk walking on a moderate incline is probably around 75 watts. 75 * 3.6 = 270. Or a hundred watts at most, therefore 360 calories max. Or put another way, 5 or 6 calories per minute. I use 5 cal/min for generic walking/treadmill. You would have to significantly raise the power output through either speed or incline to get to 700.

PS Another way to slice and dice the numbers is, calories per mile. Treadmill or road, a mile's a mile. NET calories for a mile is typically estimated at 60-100 depending on one's weight and some other factors (hill gradient, etc). Let's go with the top end estimate of 100. 3.5 mph for an hour = 3.5 miles = 350 calories. Which squares nicely with the wattage formula if you assume 100 watts, i.e. 360 calories. That's about half of what your machine is reporting, which is typical.