Do you eat Your Exercise Calories
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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.2 -
The more I exercise the more I eat. On high intensity days I am usually hungry.... and eating all day.0
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janejellyroll 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.
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You should never eat your exercise calories as figured by MyFitnessPal because you are likely overestimating your calorie burn. Set a daily target and try to hit that. If you can get a true average TDEE (Apple Watch calls it "Resting Energy") then that's your target calorie level to maintain ignoring exercise.1
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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.3 -
You should never eat your exercise calories as figured by MyFitnessPal because you are likely overestimating your calorie burn. Set a daily target and try to hit that. If you can get a true average TDEE (Apple Watch calls it "Resting Energy") then that's your target calorie level to maintain ignoring exercise.
There is one calorie burn figure that is of course totally incorrect no matter what - 0.
As in "should never eat"
Apple Resting Energy isn't TDEE either. (and if you think it's true that's another matter)
TDEE - TOTAL, ie everything, Daily Energy Expenditure3 -
concordancia wrote: »janejellyroll 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.1 -
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.0
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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.2 -
Jthanmyfitnesspal wrote: »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.
It will only throw you extra calories if the number that comes to MFP from Garmin suggests your all-day calorie burn is higher than MFP expects based on your activity level. Yes, it can be wrong . . . but not everyone gets extra calories. Those who have negative adjustments enabled may even have calories removed, y'know?
Then there are people like me (probably not very many, because statistics): I don't even synch my Garmin to MFP because it consistently and dramatically *underestimates* my all-day calorie burn, even though I've been wearing the Garmin routinely for well over a year (so it's had time to "learn" me). That's in comparison to nearly 6 years of quite careful logging practice, and the weight effects that resulted from my routine. You'll have to trust me that I'm not doing some mystery exercise/activity that escapes Garmin's notice, or dramatically overestimating my eating despite the consistent food scale use. I'm not.
People often post (and worry) about MFP or trackers overestimating calories. I'm sure that does happen. (For sure, there are flaws in how MFP has implemented METS-based exercise estimating, as I understand it . . . but that doesn't apply to tracker synch.)
People rarely post about MFP or trackers underestimating calories. That can happen, too. In rare cases, the underestimate can be severe enough to cause problems. I'd lose around a pound a week if I believed MFP and my tracker, something that would be a pretty poor health choice at 125 pounds and BMI 20. Rare, but it can happen.0 -
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.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.
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.
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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.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.
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.
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?
At this point, I'm really unclear on what you're actually eating, how you're estimating your calories burnt through exercise, and how you're accounting for those (if you are). "Highly active" in MFP terms doesn't mean sedentary with daily exercise sessions, which seems to be what you're assuming it is describing.
The activity level estimates have nothing to do with your intentional exercise. That's a whole different thing, so I'm not sure why you keep bringing up the differences in calories between a sedentary and highly active person (in MFP terms).
If you configure your goal in ways that already account for some or all of your exercise, you obviously don't want to eat those calories back. That's common sense. You've already accounted for them.
The point is that active people should account for their exercise in some way.1 -
No, I'm saying I set my activity level as high and eat to the high activity level calorie 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?
Anyway, I don't think added anything other than confusion, so I'll drop out here.0 -
No, I'm saying I set my activity level as high and eat to the high activity level calorie 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?
Anyway, I don't think added anything other than confusion, so I'll drop out here.
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.
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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.1 -
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.0 -
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.4 -
The point of exercise is actually for good health. Burning calories is a by product of it.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.
And if you're not eating some of them back, then you're calculating incorrectly using the app.
It's basic math. If you're eating 1200 calories day and do 300 calories worth of exercise, then your NET calorie intake is 900. That's UNDER EATING.
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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.0 -
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.
You are hitting the 1500 lower limit that MyFitnessPal will not go below which is why your numbers don't make sense.
You would be far better advised to pick a tool that works the way you want it to rather than manipulate one designed to work in a different way.
BTW - no I never went anywhere near the minimum level as never wanted to crash diet.5
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