What %of exercise calories do you eat ?

I usually eat and average of about 50%. Some days it's 100%, and sometimes it's less that 20%.

I estimate them carefully, then eat 100%. I did that all through losing, and of course in maintenance (have to, if I don't want to keep losing, y'know?). It's worked fine for 5+ years now, for me, during periods when I'm exercising lots, and when I'm barely exercising at all.

In one sense, exercise calories are no different from tooth-brushing calories or floor-mopping calories: We burn them, we need to account for them. The difference is that with MFP, we account for them a little differently. When I’m losing, I think of my calorie deficit as something I subtract from my base calorie goal, rather than messing around figuring out what percent of a variable amount of exercise I should not eat. For me, that’s much easier.

I hope that while you’re healing, you’re eating at maintenance calories or close, for at least a few weeks, not trying to lose weight? Best healing requires calories and nutrition. I kept a calorie deficit after laparoscopic gallbladder removal – one of the less intrusive surgeries – and came to wish I’d gone to maintenance for 3-4 weeks at least. Fortunately, my body did prioritize the healing, so that went OK, but there was more weakness and fatigue alongside than I would’ve preferred.

I had breast surgery (bilateral mastectomies/no reconstruction) some years back, so I can empathize with where you find yourself now. (From discussing it with friends, I think lumpectomy is actually a more challenging recovery than simple mastectomy, though the latter’s arguably a more major life impact, I guess.)

If you prefer to eat the same number of calories daily, I’d suggest you use a good TDEE calculator to get a calorie goal, then plug that into MFP manually, rather than let it estimate for you. IMU, the activity multipliers typically are different between TDEE method and MFP, because MFP assumes activity is all non-exercise movement.

Wishing you smooth & speedy healing!

Generally 50 % of whatever a machine or app reports, which I've found to be the "true" net calories burned, as per my bathroom scale results over time. Meaning, if I eat half of my machine/app reported exercise calories over a month or two and otherwise adhere to my target calorie deficit for 1 lb/week weight loss, I lose 1 lb per week.

My experience with this is that any number between 30 and 70 % of reported exercise cals will get the job done. Sometimes it depends on my mood. If I'm extra-hungry, I'll allow myself up to 70 % of exercise cals in food. If I'm not hungry, I won't force myself to eat half the exercise cals, but I'll always eat at least 30 % just to be responsible about it.

It varies. I allow myself to eat back all of them, but most of the time I have still some left when I go to bed. Usually just a few, under or around a hundred calories, but from time to time it's a lot more. (But also, from time to time I overeat, so it averages out, I guess.)

I just had to play with it a bit.

You can read above in the several posts that there are many roads to Rome.

I finally settled on "Lightly Active." The descriptors MFP gives would lead me to think I'm Sedentary BUT I also use a lower calorie exercise estimation than what MFP says. I just did the data collection and settled on this for myself.

I decided early on to try just using a flat number for exercise calories so I use 300 calories per hour of my intensity of moderate exercise. MFP says 500 for Exercise calories but Sedentary. I use 300 for Exercise but Lightly Active (which gives me 250 more daily base calories). Meh. Both ways come out to about the same.

I came up with my little "system" by logging food and exercise over Time and stepping on the body weight scale. I'm just doing what works and what's easy for me.

That's the only way. Run the experiment. Like sijomial says, close enough is good enough for weight loss.

I use better estimate and all of them are eaten back.

The point of my workouts isn't just to burn calories, like this is extra deficit (which isn't always smart anyway making a bigger deficit, like if body is trying to repair).

I'm spending my time and energy and effort to improve the body from exercise - if it's not given enough to repair, or to have a good workout in the first place - then what is the point of my efforts?

But I'm also correct on my daily activity level, adjustments from tracker.
I eat less when I do less, and of course eat more when I do more.

IMO how much of the exercise calories you eat depends on how accurate you feel the calorie burned # is. If you have reason to believe its very accurate then eat it all. If over time you lose slower than predicted, then eat less. If you feel the # is likely inflated, then start with eating half and judge by how you feel and how your weight loss reality compares to expected over the next few months.

I try not eating exercise calories back but if I do eat some atleast I feel less guilty about it 🤷‍♀️

size102be wrote: »

What % of exercise called do you eat back ?

I just had a lumpectomy ( Brest cancer operation ) 3 weeks ago and I can’t exercise atm as pain but I was running 5-8 km a week x 3-4 days before this

I wondered what’s the best way to set mfp up

Inactive way % of exercise calories

Lightly active beat the amount mfp gives ?

Whilst I’m recovering

When I can run again I’m not sure how active running 25 lm a week is and walking ?

Thanks

If you're including your running and walking in your activity level, you wouldn't eat any exercise calories back...they're already accounted for in your activity level at that point. This however, is not how MFP is designed. MFP is designed to have your activity level just be your day to day hum drum. The reason you eat back calories with MFP is because that exercise is activity in excess of what you set your activity level to and thus unaccounted for.

If you include exercise in your activity level and then log it and eat back calories, you are double dipping.

None. I only burn around 350 calories from exercising and am fairly sedentary otherwise.