Calories with exercise

Given your current weight 1200 sounds like too low of a calorie target. What calorie target did MyFitnessPal give you?

MarcyTheGreat88 wrote: »

That sounds like a good rule of thumb. I'm about 300 pounds and 5'8. I do low intensity exercise because of my size and my bad back. So I'll do a slow easy bike ride for 25 mins and it says I burn over 400 calories on my Fitbit! It just doesn't seem right, so I've kept my calories at 1300 on the days I do 30 mins of exercise. So what you said makes sense Lhenderson. Thank you!

Agree - it sounds far, far too high.
Two issues can commonly contribute to that:
Methods that base the estimate on weight for cycling are badly flawed for heavy people as it's a non-weight bearing exercise.
Methods that base estimates on heartbeat can be enormously inflated for people that aren't very fit or simply have a high exercise heartrate.

Roughest of rough guesses just estimating what power you might be producing more like 216 - 288 per hour.
If your bike tells you average watts you can get a very accurate estimate.
.

I'm just now starting my health journey, (for the million time) I started at 263 and I'm now 245. I have pcos so I understand where you are coming from. But a rule of thumb for anyone when losing weight regardless of underlying conditions is; If you can't eat that way the rest of your life then is not the right diet for you. Try eating more and definitely find a good Dr that can help you. I know it's hard because Drs seem to be clueless about nutrition, but you can do it. You've got this!

If you have the fitbit app you can go to the meal plan section (I think that's what it's called) and you can sync MFP to it so that it gives you a realistic number of how much more you can eat with regards to your exercise that day. You can also set how much you want your deficit to be.i find it quite helpful and now I used that as my main tool, while I just MFP to calculate food intake

Hi Marcy, I don't want to invalidate your experience, but something doesn't make sense here. You say you gained on 1740 calories, yet you lost 10lbs when eating 1200 calories.

So lets look at some numbers to make you understand why I find something is off.
in order to lose 1lbs you need to eat 3500 calories less.
Thus to lose 10lbs you need to eat 35000 calories less.
You say you gained on 1740 calories
You also say you lost those 10lbs eating 1200 calories in one month.
The different between gaining and losing is only 540 calories per day
or 540* 30 = 16200 calories in one month.
But above shows you'd need to eat 35000 less per month to lose 10lbs, not 16200
Which means you'd need to eat 35000/30 = 1166calories less per day
-> 1166 calories underneath your maintenance calories. But 1740 weren't even your maintenance calories as you wrote you gained on it. Thus your maintenance calories are below 1740 per day. Lets say 1650?
1650-1166 = 484. Did you only eat 484 calories per day?

MarcyTheGreat88 wrote: »

So my goal is around 1200 calories a day, and I've been losing weight no problem! My question is, when I exercise, MFP tells me to basically eat the calories I burn. Is this something I have to do to stay healthy? Or can I keep it at 1200 if I am feeling alright? Do I have to eat extra calories when I burn calories exercising?

Thanks everyone 😊

Your calorie target with MFP is based on ZERO exercise in your activity level, just your day to day humdrum. Using MFP as designed, exercise is completely unaccounted for activity. The more you move, the more calories (energy) your body requires to maintain good health. Not properly accounting for exercise activity can and often does result in an overly large calorie (energy) deficiency that is not healthy. Remember that calories are providing you with the mere ability to exist as well as go about your day to day activities and engage in physical exercise and physical recreation.

Depending on rate of loss selected and activity level, many people have large deficits already built in...substantial exercise that is unaccounted for just makes this bigger. Large calorie deficits along with substantial exercise put a huge stress load on the body and that load can jack with hormones, particularly cortisol which can ultimately inhibit fat loss. Large deficits also typically result in your body compensating for the lack of energy coming in by slowing down or ceasing altogether "non-essential" functions...which is where you start to see people having hair growth issues...thinning and falling out...brittle nails...loss of menstrual cycle for women, etc. All of these things require energy (calories) and in an effort to conserve energy, the body just slows these processes down. Fatigue and lethargy and a drop in involuntary movements like fidgeting are also common. All of the above essentially slow your metabolism.

The difficult thing with MFP is accurately determining both calories in and calories out. There are inherent human deficiencies and error in logging calories in...this occurs even with nutritionists and dieticians. It's near impossible to be spot on. Estimating calories out can be even more difficult. Then you have the nature of the exercise...for example, I'm not going to be overly concerned about not specifically fueling my 2 mile recreational walk with my dog as it isn't going to require any particular recovery or a whole lot of energy and we're biologically built for the task...a 30 mile bike ride or 4-6 hours out on my mountain bike are a completely different story.

Oh my goodness, glad you went and they are able to help now, take care!

I had the same thing happen about 8 years ago. I kept gaining weight, and I was sticking strictly to a 1200 calorie diet. Turns out I almost died of kidney failure due to an infection, caused by pressure put on my kidneys by a 16lb ovarian cyst. Had it out, and been fine ever since. Glad you found it before it got to the point I had it.

Glad you are home recovering. I’d encourage you to eat at maintenance calories while you heal. Give your body the time it needs before adding the stress of a calorie deficit.