Possibly a stupid question on weight loss and calorie target

Memphiswoolf8434 wrote: »

Hi all so I'm not new to the fitness and dieting scene however it's something I never thought about and with a major health issue that began in 2020 I became unable to train at the gym or go for walks . Built myself back up to good length walks now and I use mfp to track my diet. I'm set at 1790 kcal for my daily target but on days like today I didn't feel like eating much so had a protein pouch and protein bar for breakfast then went for a walk stuck on my map my walk and did my 13k burnt around 1.1k in calories so it left me with two thousand something calories left I ate my dinner and had a few snacks and got up to my target leaving me the 1000 roughly I burnt off.

My question is this if my my fitness pal is already set to a calorie deficit for my daily intake and I do things like burn the 1.1k would I still be In that deficit if I ate those 1.1k back in additional protein? Am I under eating by doing this as I'm already 500kcal in deficit
Or am I killing my chances of losing weight by eating back what I burn.

I don't want to lose too much muscle as this happened when I became sick and I have an actual issue with a couple of muscles atrophying and it's become permanent. I am 118kg down from 137.6kg at the start of the year.

I've got another 7 stone to lose long term

Probably not, because those exercise calories are probably inflated. Not because it's protein.

I wouldn't trust MapMyWalk calories.
Partly because it is a gross calorie estimate (double counts the calories you would have burned in that period of time) but also it plain seems too generous.

Suggest you use the calculator linked above to work out your typical net calories burned for a mile walking and just use MapMyWalk to give you the distance.

Yes take your exercise into account to keep your deficit sensible and less onerous but try to make those estimates reasonable.

Knowing that the US population is way up on the obesity scale and way down on physical health and longevity, see if anything pops out at you from the attached highly sourced study.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2674408/

App expects you to eat back actual calories expended on additional activities to continue to apply a sane deficit.

All other things being equal.

There is some exercise adaptation when eating at a deficit.

There are some studies showing limits to total daily burns due to increased activity (probably by ancillary compensation post activity; but who knows)

Basically exercise good. Excess exercise just to burn calories... so so.

Sources of error:

- primary: logged intake
- secondary: correctly determining and logging net exercise calories

Does this mean logging and testing back zero? No.

Does this mean eating back 1000Cal for a 10 minute walk (kidding for effect here 😹), again no.

Even ex rx doesn't give you your **MFP** net additional value.

Ex rx assigns 1MET as the difference between gross and net calories, which is definitionally correct

But MFP assigns 1.25*BMR to each minute if you're set as sedentary (also known as "not very active" in some versions of mfp). The value becomes 1.4, 1.6, or 1.8x BMR for the other settings through to very active

This is the base amount you would deduct if you wanted your true additional net calories estimate.

So if your walk is a MET 3.5 activity, your net additional calories would range from an extra 2.25*BMR*minute/1440 to as little as an extra 1.7*BMR*minute/1440 depending on your MFP setting.

Hence the often heard recommendation to eat half the specific exercise calories.

Note that connected trackers synchronize in a different way.

When it comes to a connected trackers that deal with whole day calories and not a specific exercise... ALL calories of the adjustment are game for eating.... subject to longer term verification that your weight is reacting long term as per the expectations of your logging

neffybetty wrote: »

You should get a fitbit. Their calorie burns were accurate for me.

No, they should not. That a tracker is accurate for you doesn't mean it is for others. Many trackers also have a habit of grossly overstating calorie burns for walking. Like me strolling through a forest for 16km, and I get 1500 calories. No way! Also, trackers that use HR need to be calibrated properly to work for specific people. The standard is 220-age, which is rather wrong for a large number of the population, and hence leads to too high or too low estimates. Also, such a tracker costs money. There's no need to get one. Being reasonable, and realistic with steps or distances, regardless whether it's based on a tracker, an app, or just measuring out the distance later on a map is important though.