Exercise calories?

I spent 6 weeks tracking and I ate The added calories, did not loose, last week I did not add them and lost 7 lbs

Estimated them carefully all through weight loss (class 1 obese to a healthy weight, 50-some pounds, in less than a year), and ate them all back. Same thing for 7+ years of maintenance since, staying at a healthy weight that whole time.

Not properly fueling exercise - i.e., totally ignoring that calorie burn - would not let my exercise give me the health, strength, and fitness benefits that are important to me. I don't exercise to lose weight, I do the forms of exercise I do in order to get better at them, and improve my fitness.

If a person is going for a very conservative weight loss rate, like less than 0.5% of current weight per week, and only doing a couple of hundred calories of exercise 3x a week or something like that, it may be fine to let exercise calories increase the calorie deficit to lose weight faster.

If someone's shooting for an aggressive weight loss rate, like above 1% of current weight per week, and doing several hundreds of calories of exercise daily (or near daily), that's a recipe for increased health risk, fatigue, burnout, and maybe worse.

In between those extremes, it's a question of how much health risk you like in your life. For me, good health is a key reason why both fitness and healthy weight are worth pursuing, so I'm not going to take stupid chances.

That said, it's pretty common for people to over-estimate exercise calories. (Even fitness trackers only estimate calorie, they don't measure calorie burn. They do it pretty well for some exercises, pretty poorly for others.)

Like Ann, I always ate every single delicious "exercise calorie."

I used a food scale and logged food with verified entries (that I verified myself, to the gram.) So I was confident in my food logging skillset. I used a flat 300 calories per hour of moderate exercise. That was a number I chose after using a heart rate monitor, and averaging the numbers given by several online calculators for exercise.

That number worked for me. I lost at the rate I chose in the goals. We each have our own way of doing things. You do have to run the experiment and figure it out.

Find your way. In some aspects it depends on accuracy if you're going to depend on a FOOD log but how you approach that accuracy can be individualized and will always have a margin of error. I figure I make a couple hundred calories a day of errors, and I'm pretty careful. In some human endeavors exactitude isn't really possible. Luckily with weight loss - close enough is good enough (within reasonable margins.)

I eat back all my exercise calories. I lost 55 lbs. and have maintained that loss for about 10 years. Since I walk 2-3 miles and run 5-6 most days, it adds up. I have found that if I eat less, I am starving at night and don't sleep.

tomcustombuilder wrote: »

I don’t add exercise calories. My exercise program is pretty consistent all the time so I just go for a straight daily target that’s the same every day.

MFP can be off on their exercise calorie amounts. The calorie burn will also be different for different people so I just leave it out of the equation, eliminating one more thing to factor in that is probably incorrect anyway.

It’s a personal choice on how to approach it. Some people add the calories, some don’t and some add 50%. Your progress or lack of it will determine if you’re on the right track or not.

Are you getting your daily target from MFP or a TDEE calculator?

I find MFP vastly exaggerates the calories lost for a particular exercise (I swim laps and use a stationary bike) so I just ignore this. If I keep to my 1200 limit, I lose weight pretty steadily and I try within that limit to reserve some calories for a low cal snack before bed, like an apple or nonfat yogurt.