Do you eat Your Exercise Calories

mpkpbk2015 wrote: »

Do you eat back your exercise calories even when your stomach/body is telling you your full for the day.

My stomach/body doesn't have a brain - and I originally had to lose weight because that described feedback was obviously not working correctly.

I now know the foreign language the body speaks in most cases, most don't.

mpkpbk2015 wrote: »

middleagegirl wrote: »

Isn't the point of exercising to burn calories? Why would I eat them back after all of the work???
So no, I do not eat mine back. I don't even log what I burn.

From what I have read and been told your supposed to according to MFP program. That's why I put the question out there to see exactly how many people actually do. Because when I tried I winded up gaining. thanks for sharing

Not just MFP though, TDEE calculators and all day trackers also take your exercise into account - just in different ways.
There's this perception that MFP is unusual for "eating back exercise calories" but the strange thing for someone calorie counting would actually be to ignore a significant contributor to their calorie balance. That's not how estimating works!

The most likely reason for your gain would be inaccuracy in your food or exercise logging and for most people it's the food side that has the most power to skew the numbers due to the relatives sizes of the numbers over your week.

mpkpbk2015 wrote: »

heybales wrote: »

mpkpbk2015 wrote: »

Do you eat back your exercise calories even when your stomach/body is telling you your full for the day.

My stomach/body doesn't have a brain - and I originally had to lose weight because that described feedback was obviously not working correctly.

I now know the foreign language the body speaks in most cases, most don't.

I am not saying the stomach/body has a brain but you or at least I know when I feel full. And according to my dietician I should pay attention to that feeling and stop eating or I will go back to weighing 227 pounds again and I am not letting that happen.

But didn't you gain weight such it needs to be lost now because you were eating until you felt full?

Or you mean you felt full - and kept eating?

The reason I said it that way - to show you can't trust it without knowledge of it - and again it's like a foreign language, and if you don't know you'll misunderstand it.

Just as many can easily overeat without "feeling" full, the body can also fool you by not feeling hungry when in actuality you can be undereating by an amount that can cause problems.

Feeling full, and fully feeding your body is not the same thing.

It's gotten to a bad point when a person has undereaten too long, and body starts to adapt to the foolishness and they no longer feel hungry. It's a bad state if frequent or continuous thing.

People refer to the "TDEE Method," which is a bit of a misnomer (not that there's any problem with that). Really what they mean is that they're eating a fixed number of calories per day and not adjusting for variations in TDEE due to activity level, but achieving an average that controls their weight. A fine approach!

If you have very large exertions on certain days, it's becomes harder to do the fixed calorie approach. My workouts can burn anywhere from 500 to 1500kcals, so I try to know where I land on a particular day, eating a bit more when necessary. Actually, I wish MFP would show your cumulative deficit for the past several days to make it easier to spread a re-feed out, but you can just keep it in mind.

Finally, I will complain that, if you link a Garmin to your account, it's always throwing you extra calories. For example, today it's given me an extra 67kcals just for taking the trash out. I find it best to undershoot those calories, perhaps to make up for my sloppy logging.

dolorsit wrote: »

If I set my goal as 1kg/week and activity level as sedentary, I get a target of 1500 cals/day and a projected loss of 0.4kg/week. If I set my activity level at highly active since I do 5-6 workouts of 1-4 hours each, I get a target of 1640 cals/day and a projected loss of 1kg/week. That tells me not to eat all my exercise calories back.

If you're setting your activity level based on your exercise, you're already eating your exercise calories back. You're just doing it in different way.

MFP is designed for you to set your activity level based on non-exercise daily activity. Of course, many people do as you do and choose an activity level that incorporates their exercise. Instead of logging the exercise, you're choosing to assume it will happen and just eat those calories up front.

janejellyroll wrote: »

dolorsit wrote: »

If I set my goal as 1kg/week and activity level as sedentary, I get a target of 1500 cals/day and a projected loss of 0.4kg/week. If I set my activity level at highly active since I do 5-6 workouts of 1-4 hours each, I get a target of 1640 cals/day and a projected loss of 1kg/week. That tells me not to eat all my exercise calories back.

If you're setting your activity level based on your exercise, you're already eating your exercise calories back. You're just doing it in different way.

MFP is designed for you to set your activity level based on non-exercise daily activity. Of course, many people do as you do and choose an activity level that incorporates their exercise. Instead of logging the exercise, you're choosing to assume it will happen and just eat those calories up front.

Last I checked, MFP doesn't actually adjust your calories based on the exercise goals that you set. Those are just there to set the reminders on whether or not you met your goals.

dolorsit wrote: »

If I set my goal as 1kg/week and activity level as sedentary, I get a target of 1500 cals/day and a projected loss of 0.4kg/week. If I set my activity level at highly active since I do 5-6 workouts of 1-4 hours each, I get a target of 1640 cals/day and a projected loss of 1kg/week. That tells me not to eat all my exercise calories back.

Might want to reread the descriptions of those activity levels - nothing to do with exercise - you are thinking of external sites that account for differences in exercise but not daily activity.

So that 140 cal difference has nothing to do with exercise - but rather estimated difference in daily activity.

And that is excellent example for those that think they'll just ramp up that level and cover a decent amount of daily and weekly exercise.

140 cal is likely a 1 hr walk for many people - not much more, therefore it would barely begin to cover exercise.

concordancia wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

dolorsit wrote: »

If I set my goal as 1kg/week and activity level as sedentary, I get a target of 1500 cals/day and a projected loss of 0.4kg/week. If I set my activity level at highly active since I do 5-6 workouts of 1-4 hours each, I get a target of 1640 cals/day and a projected loss of 1kg/week. That tells me not to eat all my exercise calories back.

If you're setting your activity level based on your exercise, you're already eating your exercise calories back. You're just doing it in different way.

MFP is designed for you to set your activity level based on non-exercise daily activity. Of course, many people do as you do and choose an activity level that incorporates their exercise. Instead of logging the exercise, you're choosing to assume it will happen and just eat those calories up front.

Last I checked, MFP doesn't actually adjust your calories based on the exercise goals that you set. Those are just there to set the reminders on whether or not you met your goals.

It doesn't, but this person was referring to setting their activity level to highly active. Your activity level WILL change your daily calories. MFP's intention is for one to make that selection independent of intentional exercise, but there are people who either 1) don't understand that or 2) understand it, but choose to include exercise anyway.

dolorsit wrote: »

I think my point was missed. It wasn't the 140 cals difference, it was the 0.6kg (1.3lb in old money) a week in weight loss difference based on how you enter your activity level.

I think the issue is that you're assuming the only difference between "sedentary" and "very active" is a daily workout. It likely isn't. If you tell MFP your overall lifestyle is highly active, that's more than just a daily exercise session on top of a sedentary lifestyle.

janejellyroll wrote: »

I think the issue is that you're assuming the only difference between "sedentary" and "very active" is a daily workout. It likely isn't. If you tell MFP your overall lifestyle is highly active, that's more than just a daily exercise session on top of a sedentary lifestyle.

I'm not assuming that. I do 10-11 hours of running/cycling per week. I don't eat anywhere near all of them back, because if I did I'd end up losing 0.4kg/week according to MFP's projection as a sedentary person (work from home). If I enter my activity level as high, I get a 1kg/week projection eating 1640 cals/day.

Basically, what I'm trying (badly) to say, is that blanket advice to eat all your exercise calories, doesn't necessarily make sense to everybody, because it depends how you configure your goal.

janejellyroll wrote: »

Are you saying that you enter your activity level as highly active under the assumption that includes all your exercise and then eat to the sedentary goal?

No, I'm saying I set my activity level as high and eat to the high activity level calorie goal.

Anyway, I don't think added anything other than confusion, so I'll drop out here.

Part of what sometimes gets lost in this kind of discussion is that exercise calories aren't really special.

They're like tooth-brushing calories, or TV-watching calories. We burn them. We eat them, or if we don't, they contribute to our deficit.

If our deficit gets too small, and we want to lose weight, we won't lose. If our deficit gets too big, we create health risk. We want the deficit to be "just right", a la Goldilocks.

It doesn't matter whether the deficit is running calories, or tooth-brushing calories, or brain-activity calories. They're all calories burned. They all go in the same bucket. What matters is the total, and how that compares to the total number we eat. Both sides are estimates, unavoidably, with those estimates validated long term by what happens on average on the body-weight scale.

If what we reasonably desire doesn't happen with our bodyweight, we adjust intake or activity. We can do that adjustment any way we choose: Eat back more/less exercise calories, raise/lower base calorie goal manually, leave a "calorie cushion" of uneaten calories or create a intake excess above goal every day, change activity level up/down in MFP guided setup (even to some setting that isn't objectively true, if necessary/desired), actually increase daily life or exercise calorie expenditure, maybe other ways. Doesn't matter. Any method of adjusting the deficit reaches the same weight-management outcome, if the actual calorie adjustment number is the same.

All that's different about exercise calories is how we choose to account for them, not the calories themselves.

The TDEE-based approaches averages in planned exercise. A pro of this (for some people) is that one gets the same calorie goal every day, exercise or no. A con is that if one has aggressive exercise plans, but isn't consistent about doing that exercise at the needed intensity, weight won't behave as expected (except by blind luck of inaccuracies in other estimates).

The MFP-style approach logs exercise separately. A pro of this is the useful lesson that eating more means higher food needs, and that being inactive requires lower intake. A con is that we have to estimate the exercise separately, which has inaccuracy potential in either method, but the potential inaccuracy slaps us in the face, with this method.

There can be personal reasons to prefer either. (For example, I like the MFP method, because my exercise is variable, seasonal, and affected by weather in season, so somewhat unpredictable.)

The difference is accounting. Exercise calories aren't special. They're part of *actual* TDEE either way, and need to be considered in calorie intake somehow, either way.

Side note: The MFP or TDEE calculator base calorie estimates can be wrong, too, in rare cases dramatically wrong. Even fitness tracker calorie estimates can be dramatically wrong, in rare cases. They're pretty much all just a statistical average of similar people, based on research. Not everyone is average. Most people are close to average. A few aren't.

I suspect some of what gets blamed on exercise calorie estimation is actually inaccuracy in base calorie estimation. I'm certain that some of what gets blamed on exercise calorie estimation is food-intake estimation inaccuracy.

dolorsit wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

So you're setting your activity level based on your exercise. You're eating your exercise calories, you're just choosing the activity level to do it.

My point was. If I set my activity level as sedentary, I would eat back *all* of my exercise calories resulting in a 0.4kg/week weight loss. Instead, I set my activity level as high and I eat back half of them or fewer, resulting in a 1kg/week weight loss. That's just the way MFP is set up to not let you go below a target of 1500 cal/day as a male.

So . . . you're using MFP in a way that pushing you below 1,500 net per day? Yeah, not everyone can lose 1 kg a week while netting the minimum number of calories they should eat. This isn't really a drawback of eating exercise calories, it's more like ensuring that you're properly fueling your body.

janejellyroll wrote: »

So . . . you're using MFP in a way that pushing you below 1,500 net per day?

Yes. Just as everyone who actually is highly active and whose MFP calorie recommendation is around 1650 would also be doing.