Hitting my calorie goal and exercising but still not losing weight

I know the above quoted post is theoretically correct, but I'd encourage folks to understand what one MET (estimated) is in their individual context, even when multiplied by the activity factor, and think about how excitable they choose to be over the differences. For young, big, male people it may be more numerically large, but they also are likely to have a larger TDEE, so the proportions may not be that different. (That's if I'm doing the math right, which is not necessarily always true.)

Example for me, someone pretty old (67), female, not all that big (5'5"), around 130 pounds now. Mifflin St Jeor would have my BMR at 1226. That puts a simpleminded MET at about 51 calories per hour, 1.25 MET at about 64 calories, 1.6 MET at 82 calories, 1.8 MET at 92 calories.

So, yeah, if I take a long, slow walk, that error adds up (because the actual exercise calories are low per hour).

But for a more normal half hour doing what people might think of as an actual workout, where I burn maybe 150-200 calories (conservative lowball estimate), we'd be subtracting (0.5 X 1 MET X activity factor), which is in the range of 32-46 calories. Even in context of my estimated TDEE at sedentary, which is 1351 (still Mifflin St Jeor), that's not a big worry: Arithmetically, not make or break. (In context of my actual TDEE, typically more like 2000+, it's truly trivial as a source of estimating error.)

When we quibble about subtracting 1 vs. even 1.8 METS for something like a half hour of exercise, we're talking (in my example) something like 41 calories.

I'm not saying no one needs to worry about this distinction, what I'm saying is that if someone wants to be more accurate, and is able to do some math, it's worth considering how much effort or angst to invest in this particular question, given their estimated BMR, activity level, exercise type/duration/intensity, and that sort of thing.

All of this stuff is just estimates, and - even though I believe that accuracy is helpful - a person could drive herself batty trying to be super-exact about everything. It's worth a thought about how the particular issue fits into the big picture, so one doesn't end up chasing minor factors while missing more major ones. (The terribleness of some types of estimates for some types of exercise is a much bigger deal, for example.)

For me personally, it makes sense to use the ExRX calculator to get a net estimate for slow, long walks . . . but I don't much worry about gross vs. net for more normal exercise estimates that are working with a well-metered base of 400-600 exercise calories per hour (gross) in context of a 51 calorie MET. Meh. Random variability in the sweetness of fruit or fat content of packaged foods - let alone stuff I forget to log - probably looms larger.

Good reference for METS: https://sites.google.com/site/compendiumofphysicalactivities/home

A person could even make a better estimate of their own MET value than the half-***ed substitute of estimated BMR that I used above, because I'm lazy and TBH don't love math.