Exercise & calorie intake

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ellobo423
ellobo423 Posts: 5 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
Hello I am looking to loose weight and increasing my exercise to do so. I do want to take in enough calories for the exercise but not beyond what I should in order to loose weight. I see the program adds calories depending on the amount of exercise… I just wanted to confirm ideally one should increase calorie intake by that much and still be able to loose weight? Thank you!

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  • danielav1982
    danielav1982 Posts: 2 Member
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    Ideally. Depending on how much exercise you're doing and what your account is set at. Did you set an amount of exercise when you signed up?

    I didn't account for exercise so any exercise I do is extra.

    If you're looking to eat back your exercise calories, calories from protein is the best. Try a smoothie with some leanfit protein powder
  • FunkmasterRex
    FunkmasterRex Posts: 153 Member
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    Usually people set caloric intake to an number that loses a certain amount of over a period of time like 0.5lbs, 1lb or 2lbs per month. If you do exercise on top of that, the app will add calories that will still allow you to lose those sane amounts because you've exercised to offset the higher calorie count. So eating the extra calories is still targeting the preset weight loss. Over time if your caloric intake is too low, you may lose weight faster but you will be also be operating suboptimally in terms of health.
  • ellobo423
    ellobo423 Posts: 5 Member
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    I have connected my Fitbit so MyFitnessPal uses that for the exercise calories … which Increases the daily intake depending on the amount of calories used
  • pridesabtch
    pridesabtch Posts: 2,315 Member
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    It is important to account for exercise in your intake to ensure you are fueling your body, but you are right, its a balancing act.

    A good way to see where you are on your goal is to log everything you take in and all of your exercise for a month (or 2) and see what the scale says. If you are losing faster than your set target (0.5, 1 or 2lb/week) you may need to increase your intake . If you aren't losing, you may need to adjust your intake to only eat back a portion of your exercise calories. Always remember weight loss is not linear, so giving it a month or two to see the trends is very important. I'm a data junkie so I trend my own weight, but there are apps like Happy Scale that are very nice for seeing weight trends over time.

    Good luck!
  • Lietchi
    Lietchi Posts: 6,109 Member
    edited June 2022
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    danielav1982 wrote: »
    Ideally. Depending on how much exercise you're doing and what your account is set at. Did you set an amount of exercise when you signed up?

    I didn't account for exercise so any exercise I do is extra.

    If you're looking to eat back your exercise calories, calories from protein is the best. Try a smoothie with some leanfit protein powder

    Actually, what you enter as your exercise goal/intention at set-up is not taken into account at all for your calorie goal, it doesn't actually influence anything: only exercise logged in your diary influences your calorie goal (as well as your chosen activity level, which shouldn't include exercise, and your personal stats).
  • cwolfman13
    cwolfman13 Posts: 41,876 Member
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    ellobo423 wrote: »
    Hello I am looking to loose weight and increasing my exercise to do so. I do want to take in enough calories for the exercise but not beyond what I should in order to loose weight. I see the program adds calories depending on the amount of exercise… I just wanted to confirm ideally one should increase calorie intake by that much and still be able to loose weight? Thank you!

    When you set up in MFP you set a rate of loss goal which gives you a calorie target for losing weight based on your stats and activity level...your activity level in MFP is just your day to day hum drum and does not include exercise. Exercise is unaccounted activity until you log it, at which point you get additional calories to compensate for additional activity. The hard part is accurately determining your calorie expenditure for a given exercise.

    The math looks like this. MFP will give me 1900 calories to lose 1 Lb per week without exercise. This means that MFP is estimating my maintenance calories without exercise to be 2400. If I exercise and burn 300 calories I can now eat 2200 calories and still lose 1 Lb per week because my maintenance calories would have also increased by 300 calories to 2700 calories. 2700-2200=500 calorie deficit
  • ellobo423
    ellobo423 Posts: 5 Member
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    Thank you everyone for the very helpful responses!
  • Lisa_allenn
    Lisa_allenn Posts: 11 Member
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    To lose weight, most people need to reduce the number of calories they consume and increase their physical activity. To lose 1 1/2 pounds (0.7 kilograms) a week, you need to reduce your daily calories by 500 to 750 calories.
  • Xellercin
    Xellercin Posts: 924 Member
    edited June 2022
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    I *personally* never factor in any estimates of my exercise calories in my eating in advance, but I do add more food if I find that I'm losing weight too fast as a result of exercise. I always do it in response to results, not pre-emptively based on estimates.

    The exercises I do are very hard to calculate their burn because I have so many low-burn PT exercises mixed into the routine, and my fitbit is useless because I have a very high resting heart rate, so it thinks I do hours of intense cardio every day.

    Unless I was doing extensive, super ultra intense exercise, then I just don't worry about burning too much, unless as I said, I see an alarming rate of loss on the scale, in which case, I would up my calories regardless of whether or not I'm exercising.

    For me, the best indicator of how much I should be eating is the results I get.

    For example, I've been doing long days of home renos for the last month. I don't have a scale here, but I could tell in the first weeks that my clothes were getting looser faster than is okay for me, and I was craving ice cream like crazy, and I don't even like ice cream very much, but I had some the first night I was here, and now my brain is screaming for it in the evening.

    So I can tell easily that I'm burning too much for my normal intake, and I adjust accordingly.
    lol, I've been eating A LOT of ice cream. It's temporary, so I'm okay with it ;)

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