Exercise and calories

clairesimpson4
clairesimpson4 Posts: 15 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
MFP always adds the calories burned due to exercise to the calorie "goal" but I always ignore it and stick to the same 1800 per day. One of the reasons I do this is because I have no idea if those calorie burned are accurate for me - one person's vigorous is another person's moderate I figure.

Does anyone else do this?
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Replies

  • Ann262
    Ann262 Posts: 266 Member
    Eating back exercise calories. Some days you just have to. MFP is a great tool especialy for a free tool but accuracy is not great. Better than nothing. For example, I just put in a search for bagel. The top 4 results range from 180 to 380 calories. Which do you pick when you track? You guess which yours might be. Exercise? I run and my pace is around 13 minute miles. MFP doesn't go over 12. I AM running, I am not walking fast. I use 12mm and assume the calorie burn it gives me is over estimated. I am finding that if I am eating a healthy diet (bagels are not part of a healthy breakfast for me) then I have to listen to my body's hunger signals and know the difference between real hunger and just wanting to eat because I am bored. If you are hungry, truly hungry, not craving, then EAT!! If you have calories left at the end of the day but you aren't hungry, you don't have to eat! Our bodies will tell us what we need if we just listen to it. Humans aren't supposed to live life white knuckling through hunger pangs because we are trying to lose weight. That might work, but it isn't sustainable.

    Also there will be days when you are extra hungry and go over your "calorie alottment" and other days when you aren't so hungry and are below your "calorie alottment". That's okay.
  • ValkyrieHan
    ValkyrieHan Posts: 6 Member
    My calories are 1200 per day. I usually go over and have to burn a balance of 300-400 some weeks at the gym.
    And over the holidays I remember I spent hours in the gym bc I had to burn off 700cals by the end of the week.

    I don't like dislike the gym, it's my me time, but if you're prone to obsessive behavior- becareful. It can definitely be a little overwhelming. Everyone in the thread has given really good feedback!

    I'll only emphasize DO WHAT IS SUSTAINABLE AND MOTIVATING FOR YOU TO STAY COSISTANTLY HEALTHY. It's a lifestyle :)

    Xoxo
  • cwolfman13
    cwolfman13 Posts: 41,865 Member
    clairesimpson4 wrote: »
    MFP always adds the calories burned due to exercise to the calorie "goal" but I always ignore it and stick to the same 1800 per day. One of the reasons I do this is because I have no idea if those calorie burned are accurate for me - one person's vigorous is another person's moderate I figure.

    Does anyone else do this?

    Really depends on what you're doing for exercise. Ignoring those calories for something like going for a walk or other light activity probably isn't that big of a deal given the expenditure isn't going to be all that large and lite activity doesn't really require a whole lot in terms of recovery.

    Ignoring those calories from more vigorous and/or longer duration training can be detrimental in that it can create a deficit that is overly large which can lead to all kinds of unpleasant things down the road. It can also be detrimental to fitness gains as well as recovery. 100% of exercise calories may or may not be accurate...but 0% is definitely not accurate. I'll burn in the neighborhood of 1,000 calories on a 30 mile bike ride...ignoring those would be foolish.

    I never personally used the database entries for exercise. I always used my HRM for the calories I was burning running or cycling or other aerobic activity and then knocked off my estimated BMR calories from that to get me something close to a net calorie burn. It wasn't exact, but it was close enough and I lost weight on an average of 1 Lb per week as I had planned eating back most of my exercise calories. I use the TDEE method now, but also have a power meter for my bike which is very accurate in determining calories burned cycling.
  • westrich20940
    westrich20940 Posts: 920 Member
    edited August 2021
    I did not do that when I was actively losing weight. MFP's recommendation for your calorie goal is already based on a deficit (if you used MFP to set it up, and if you chose that you wanted to lose weight --- if you used some other method and manually put in your calorie goal - then it will depend on how you decided your goal).

    So if you then burn additional calories through intentional exercise --- you are then increasing your deficit, possibly by a LOT depending on how many calories you are actually burning. So you could be creating a situation where you are undereating by a lot.

    I do agree that the calorie burn estimates in MFP can be wildly inaccurate ---so it's better to find a way that is as accurate as possible to estimate the calories burned (but remember it's still just an estimate) -- and manually put in cals burned to your workout and then eat back at least some of those cals. I personally ate back 50-100% of those calories depending on how hungry I was. I personally used a combination of an online calculator, my RunKeeper app, and my Polar HRM to estimate how many cals I burned while working out --- they all were different, sometimes by like 100 cals but I just did the best I could.

    If your calorie goal has been calculated NOT based on a deficit --- then this may not be what you should do. I'm no expert, lol.

    Also...the comment about the reason for all exercise....lol - wow. Exercise is good for weight loss if that's what you want but it's also great for
    staying healthy and mental well-being.
  • hjahangiri
    hjahangiri Posts: 56 Member
    Words do have specific meaning. :wink: "Vigorous" in the context of physical exercise is, according to the Mayo Clinic 70% to about 85% of your max heart rate (estimate by subtracting your age from 220). See https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/fitness/in-depth/exercise-intensity/art-20046887 I have seen guidance that says "up to 93%" of your max heart rate. I was supposedly AT or OVER mine for an hour, today, yet I could still have carried on a conversation. I don't know if this is good or bad - I feel fine, supposedly burned 600 calories and covered 3.5 miles.

    If you have any sort of heart disease, or take medication that may raise or lower your heart rate, check with your doctor before using any of these numbers as a guideline, because that is ALL they are - a guideline.

    What I have found is that Fitbit and Garmin, combined with strict and honest logging of food intake tend to be quite accurate over time. (Remember what the song says, when you're tempted to sweep that "one little bite" under the rug and not count it: "hips don't lie".) I also know my RMR - the calories I burn while conscious and breathing, as opposed to BMR which is what's needed just to sustain life - and it is appallingly low at 1384. I had it tested at a health clinic, so it's not a guesstimate. That is lower than any online calculator is going to "estimate." But Garmin seems to know - it's definitely not using 2K/day as a baseline!) I have a spreadsheet, and if you ignore the day to day fluctuations, it's a spot-on match between my goal weight loss, my exercise/daily activity, and my food intake.

    I try hard not to use the additional calories burned as permission to "cheat" - unless I am very hungry. Meaning I drank a glass of water, first, to check - and nope, I still really need to eat something. And then I still try to keep it to only half of the extra burned, or I'll just maintain my current weight. I look for nutrient-dense foods that are low in calories. (That's okay, too, sometimes - just holding steady at the current weight! It's not healthy, nutritionally, to lose more than 2 lbs. a week, unless under a doctor's close supervision.) Patience is a virtue.

  • heybales
    heybales Posts: 18,842 Member
    wagner879 wrote: »
    Agreed!! This notion of eating all the calories you burn is ridiculous. I’ve been using the app for several months. I was losing weight until everyone on here started saying you’re doing it all wrong and you need to be eating those calories. So for the last two weeks I tried it. My results after two weeks is a gain of 4lbs. First week I thought maybe a fluke so I tried another week. Sorry but those people are dead wrong. The goal of all exercise is to burn more calories than you consume in order to lose weight. How can you lose weight putting those calories right back in your body? Back to my original plan.

    You have to burn more calories in exercise than you eat to lose weight?

    Please don't say you heard this on TikTok!

    Some huge misunderstandings if that is your source of knowledge, as that little tidbit you gave.
  • rosebarnalice
    rosebarnalice Posts: 3,488 Member
    I determined through experimentation and borrowing a chest monitor for a couple of swims that MFP overestimates my calorie burn by about 20%. To compensate, I just reduce the swim time I enter by about 20% and it's fairly accurate for me now.

    But overall, I eat about half of my "earned" exercise calories. On a given day, I might eat them all or I might eat none. . . but I average about half
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,225 Member
    hjahangiri wrote: »
    Words do have specific meaning. :wink: "Vigorous" in the context of physical exercise is, according to the Mayo Clinic 70% to about 85% of your max heart rate (estimate by subtracting your age from 220). See https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/fitness/in-depth/exercise-intensity/art-20046887 I have seen guidance that says "up to 93%" of your max heart rate. I was supposedly AT or OVER mine for an hour, today, yet I could still have carried on a conversation. I don't know if this is good or bad - I feel fine, supposedly burned 600 calories and covered 3.5 miles.

    If you have any sort of heart disease, or take medication that may raise or lower your heart rate, check with your doctor before using any of these numbers as a guideline, because that is ALL they are - a guideline.

    What I have found is that Fitbit and Garmin, combined with strict and honest logging of food intake tend to be quite accurate over time. (Remember what the song says, when you're tempted to sweep that "one little bite" under the rug and not count it: "hips don't lie".) I also know my RMR - the calories I burn while conscious and breathing, as opposed to BMR which is what's needed just to sustain life - and it is appallingly low at 1384. I had it tested at a health clinic, so it's not a guesstimate. That is lower than any online calculator is going to "estimate." But Garmin seems to know - it's definitely not using 2K/day as a baseline!) I have a spreadsheet, and if you ignore the day to day fluctuations, it's a spot-on match between my goal weight loss, my exercise/daily activity, and my food intake.

    I try hard not to use the additional calories burned as permission to "cheat" - unless I am very hungry. Meaning I drank a glass of water, first, to check - and nope, I still really need to eat something. And then I still try to keep it to only half of the extra burned, or I'll just maintain my current weight. I look for nutrient-dense foods that are low in calories. (That's okay, too, sometimes - just holding steady at the current weight! It's not healthy, nutritionally, to lose more than 2 lbs. a week, unless under a doctor's close supervision.) Patience is a virtue.

    If you're at or above your 220-age estimated heart rate for an hour, and could've carried on a conversation at the time, that's about the strongest possible hint that 220-age is a very inaccurate HRmax estimator, for you . . . which is a remarkably common thing. It will also tend to throw off the exercise calorie estimates of a fitness tracker, though I think perhaps some of the more sophisticated devices are handling this sort of thing better in the recent versions, after the "getting to know you" period.

    If I used 220-age estimates to train, my fitness progress would have suffered significantly. (220-age=155, which is a bit above my actual 85% of max, or (more usefully) around 80% of reserve, IOW around the upper boundary of aerobic in common terms. (This isn't self-congratulatory: It's more a genetic thing, not really a training effect.) If I thought my max was 155, I'd undertrain severely.

    HRmax can be sports tested, after one has a decent base cardiovascular fitness. There are both submaximal and actual-max tests, including some that can be done as self-tests (usually need a helper). Some tracker models have built-in self tests. (A medical stress test won't necessarily produce the needed result: The techs stopped mine after they got the data they needed, well before I hit HRmax.)

    Whether a tracker and MFP will be accurate over time is not so much a function of MFP/tracker's quality, but of how nearly average a particular person happens to be, since both MFP and trackers effectively use population averages (for one's demographics) to make these estimates. Most people are close to average, a few further off (high or low), and a very rare few quite far off average. That's sort of the inherent nature of a statistical estimate. (This is a domain where the standard deviation is fairly small, besides.)

    You've done a smart thing, running an n=1 trial, and turned out to be close to average, it seems. I turned out to be very non-average . . . but once I ran that month or so trial, it was obvious approximately how non-average I am quantitatively (both MFP and my good brand/model fitness tracker - a Gamin - estimate 25-30% *low* for me, which is *hundreds* of calories daily). Once I adjusted my pre-exercise calorie goal based on that finding, I to got o have lost/maintained weight in line with the 3500 calories = roughly one pound of fat idea, for 6 years of calorie counting so far.

    OP, throughout that 6 years, I've always estimated my exercise calories carefully/conservatively, and have eaten back pretty much every delicious one of them. I've been at a healthy weight for 5+ years now, after previous *decades* of overweight/obesity, so it's worked out pretty well.

    Not everyone wants to calorie count in maintenance, which I do. In that context, knowing how to account for exercise calories - whether by logging them separately, or thoughtfully adjusting an estimated TDEE calorie goal - is IMO part of the needed skill set, long term. I know about how much to eat if I'm consistently exercising, or when I'm not. The "not" side of that is going to happen, sometimes, inevitably: Right now, I'm crankily on "no exertion" orders for a few weeks post-surgically, so eating at my base (pre-exercise) calorie goal.

    Best wishes!
  • hjahangiri
    hjahangiri Posts: 56 Member
    AnnPT77 wrote: »
    Not everyone wants to calorie count in maintenance, which I do. In that context, knowing how to account for exercise calories - whether by logging them separately, or thoughtfully adjusting an estimated TDEE calorie goal - is IMO part of the needed skill set, long term. I know about how much to eat if I'm consistently exercising, or when I'm not. The "not" side of that is going to happen, sometimes, inevitably: Right now, I'm crankily on "no exertion" orders for a few weeks post-surgically, so eating at my base (pre-exercise) calorie goal.

    Best wishes!

    This is the mistake I've made for years. I hope that I've learned from the past and won't put myself through this again. As far as I can tell, I need to be tracking "religiously" for life. Thanks, Ann.

  • springlering62
    springlering62 Posts: 8,457 Member
    edited August 2021
    I see so many posts here from people who lost, stopped tracking, and the weight crept back up. Those stories have had a huge effect on me.

    I’ve accepted that consistent logging will be part of my life til I’m no longer able to put the jar on the scale.
  • Vicky_609
    Vicky_609 Posts: 17 Member
    wagner879 wrote: »
    Agreed!! This notion of eating all the calories you burn is ridiculous. I’ve been using the app for several months. I was losing weight until everyone on here started saying you’re doing it all wrong and you need to be eating those calories. So for the last two weeks I tried it. My results after two weeks is a gain of 4lbs. First week I thought maybe a fluke so I tried another week. Sorry but those people are dead wrong. The goal of all exercise is to burn more calories than you consume in order to lose weight. How can you lose weight putting those calories right back in your body? Back to my original plan.

    Mfp works by giving you a calorie deficit before you exercise so even eating all the exercise calories back is going to leave you in a deficit. The problem is that mfp wildly over estimates that calorie burn so you cant rely on that. You can I use a watch to count my exercise calories and have to adjust what mfp suggests I burn. For a 30 minute cardio workout I burn around 140 calories. Mfp eastimates I burn 360 which is clearly wrong. Some people eat their calories back and that works for them. It works for me. I actually feel that I'd struggle with hunger if I didn't. Some people don't and that works for them.
  • wunderkindking
    wunderkindking Posts: 1,615 Member
    a method I'm using right now that I don't often see - even for those with only a little left to lose - is to set your calories to maintain and then just let your exercise create the deficit.

    This is obviously a terrible idea if you're doing a ton of exercise but for me it's working out fine and it's easier than tracking the activity and estimating the actual burn compared to MFP estimates.

  • kshama2001
    kshama2001 Posts: 28,052 Member
    nooshi713 wrote: »
    kshama2001 wrote: »
    wagner879 wrote: »
    Agreed!! This notion of eating all the calories you burn is ridiculous. I’ve been using the app for several months. I was losing weight until everyone on here started saying you’re doing it all wrong and you need to be eating those calories. So for the last two weeks I tried it. My results after two weeks is a gain of 4lbs. First week I thought maybe a fluke so I tried another week. Sorry but those people are dead wrong. The goal of all exercise is to burn more calories than you consume in order to lose weight. How can you lose weight putting those calories right back in your body? Back to my original plan.

    My mom is active because she LIKES to be. In fact, she is so active that she struggles to stay above Under Weight. She does what her personal trainer calls "extreme gardening," swims, walks, yoga, maintains a 250+ year old house, and worked with a PT before the pandemic.

    Once I move in with her I might start logging her food and exercise to show her just how many more calories she needs. For now, I just tell her to eat more calorie dense foods like nuts, cheese, etc.

    I’m interested in this extreme gardening you mentioned……

    I love gardening and it is hard work.

    My garden:

    smtaiw33woxf.jpeg

    Beautiful!

    "Extreme" just refers to the hours and hours Mom spends gardening. Her 2 acres include many perennial and vegetable gardens.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,225 Member
    wunderkindking wrote: »
    a method I'm using right now that I don't often see - even for those with only a little left to lose - is to set your calories to maintain and then just let your exercise create the deficit.

    This is obviously a terrible idea if you're doing a ton of exercise but for me it's working out fine and it's easier than tracking the activity and estimating the actual burn compared to MFP estimates.

    That method can be fine, yes.

    It can fail, too, if MFP mis-estimates one's pre-exercise maintenance calories. Rare for it to materially mis-estimate those, but possible and it does happen.

    When someone doesn't lose as expected here, they often blame the exercise calorie estimate. Sometimes that's right, of course. But any (or all) of the estimates can be wrong: Food, BMR, daily life calorie expenditure, exercise calorie expenditure.

    For most people, exercise calories are the numerically smallest thing on that list, but that exercise estimate's nearly always the one blamed for unexpected loss rate. It's odd.

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