Exercise and calories
Options
Replies
-
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.4 -
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 half2 -
kshama2001 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:
11 -
hjahangiri wrote: »Words do have specific meaning.
"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!2 -
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.
2 -
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.4 -
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.2 -
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.
3 -
kshama2001 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:
Beautiful!
"Extreme" just refers to the hours and hours Mom spends gardening. Her 2 acres include many perennial and vegetable gardens.0 -
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.2 -
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.
It's a strange thing.
On the other hand if they're making an adjustment somewhere - exercise calorie estimates, the activity level setting, food scale, deficit size - to get to the results they intend it probably doesn't much matter on an individual basis.
Giving the advice that NO ONE eat exercise calories is, however, downright dangerous.3 -
wunderkindking wrote: »
It's a strange thing.
On the other hand if they're making an adjustment somewhere - exercise calorie estimates, the activity level setting, food scale, deficit size - to get to the results they intend it probably doesn't much matter on an individual basis.
Giving the advice that NO ONE eat exercise calories is, however, downright dangerous.
This. Especially the last sentence. There are days where if I didn’t “eat back” I would net less than 500cal, which is clearly not a good idea.1
Categories
- All Categories
- 1.4M Health, Wellness and Goals
- 391.3K Introduce Yourself
- 43.5K Getting Started
- 259.7K Health and Weight Loss
- 175.6K Food and Nutrition
- 47.3K Recipes
- 232.3K Fitness and Exercise
- 388 Sleep, Mindfulness and Overall Wellness
- 6.4K Goal: Maintaining Weight
- 8.5K Goal: Gaining Weight and Body Building
- 152.7K Motivation and Support
- 7.8K Challenges
- 1.3K Debate Club
- 96.4K Chit-Chat
- 2.5K Fun and Games
- 3.2K MyFitnessPal Information
- 22 News and Announcements
- 912 Feature Suggestions and Ideas
- 2.3K MyFitnessPal Tech Support Questions