Eating back Calories Burned

I have actually spent a lot of time with this and through trial and error have found that calories burned can be off by as much as 25% (barring user errors like entering your weight and age wrong on a treadmill for example). What I like to do is subtract 25% from whatever I burn before I log and then if I do eat anything back which I feel is fine I eat max 50% so if I run and the treadmill says 1,000 calories I log 750 and allow myself to eat back 375 of it. It’s by no means a perfect solution but when I exercise it makes me hungry so not eating anything back has lead to late night binges or eating junk when I go out after working out earlier in the day. The formula I use seems to still give me the benefits of weight loss from the exercise and helps prevent bad behavior from being too hungry.

Winning4EJ wrote: »

Just curious if anyone has experimented with this and figured out what works best for them. Does eating back your calories burned still help you lose weight? I have a feeling that for me eating back the calories slows my progress.

I'm 171lbs 5'7
Goal 150ish

Well, sure, you would lose faster if you eat less, but a better question is, "What is an appropriate rate of loss for me?"

With only 20 pounds to go, it will be slow.

Many make the mistake of using too high of an activity level for their base calorie amount.

Activity level DOES NOT INCLUDE ANY EXERCISE CALORIES

I have to eat all my exercise calories back or I’d feel starved and deprived. Then, I’d binge. However, I carefully decide on the number of calories I’ve burned depending on how enthusiastic I was during my workout. I don’t use mfp’s calculations. They’re way too high for someone of my size and age. I lose slowly, but it’s been working for about 7 months now.

I lose faster when I eat my exercise calories. It helps me to not lose muscle as I lose weight, since that really defeats the purpose.

For comparison, I'm a 5' tall female in my mid-40s.

For me, Yes. I always ate every single delicious Exercise Calorie. It worked for me. I still do it. That's the way the site is designed to be used and I found a flat 300 calories per hour of (my) moderate exercise works alongside "Lightly Active" (I'm retired) and diligent logging. Your personal situation is different. Run the experiment for yourself.

https://support.myfitnesspal.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032625391-How-does-MyFitnessPal-calculate-my-initial-goals-

The Activity Level calories go up and down in increments of 250 calories, so that's another way of manipulating your base calories.

All of this is an experiment YOU have to run. Some peoples' logging is more accurate. Some people choose "Sedentary" when they're waitresses but then log their work steps. Some people find that 50% of Exercise Calories is closer to accurate. There are multiple permutations of logging/Activity Level/exercise calories. Some people use synced devices, some guess on calories eaten without using a food scale.

Log food and exercise for 4-6 weeks. Pick either "Yes" or "No" or a percentage of your exercise calories. If numbers are important to you this is the easiest way. Stick with it for 4-6 weeks. Then go back and calculate your loss based on your numbers.

westrich20940 wrote: »

When you use MFP to calculate your calorie goal and you tell it you want to lose weight - the calorie goal it gives you is already at a deficit to your maintenance calories.

When you tell it your activity level it doesn't intend for you to include purposeful exercise - just your general lifestyle (job, etc.).

You are supposed to eat the workout calories back. Otherwise you'd create too much of a deficit (i.e. consuming too low NET calories in your day). You can even this out over the week if you like but you should be eating back your exercise calories.

I lost ~25lbs eating back 80-100% of my exercise calories.

This can work or not work. It works if you are counting and tracking calories properly, have chosen the correct base activity level and choose the correct amount of calories being burned during exercise. If any of those factors are off then it won’t work properly.

Eating back 80% is not eating back all the exercise calories so that ends up being a personal adjustment to get the results you’re after which is what is best after playing around with the numbers for awhile and figuring out what works on an individual basis.

Eat back calories will be 0%-100% depending on the previously mentioned factors.

westrich20940 wrote: »

tomcustombuilder wrote: »

westrich20940 wrote: »

When you use MFP to calculate your calorie goal and you tell it you want to lose weight - the calorie goal it gives you is already at a deficit to your maintenance calories.

When you tell it your activity level it doesn't intend for you to include purposeful exercise - just your general lifestyle (job, etc.).

You are supposed to eat the workout calories back. Otherwise you'd create too much of a deficit (i.e. consuming too low NET calories in your day). You can even this out over the week if you like but you should be eating back your exercise calories.

I lost ~25lbs eating back 80-100% of my exercise calories.

This can work or not work. It works if you are counting and tracking calories properly, have chosen the correct base activity level and choose the correct amount of calories being burned during exercise. If any of those factors are off then it won’t work properly.

Eating back 80% is not eating back all the exercise calories so that ends up being a personal adjustment to get the results you’re after which is what is best after playing around with the numbers for awhile and figuring out what works on an individual basis.

Eat back calories will be 0%-100% depending on the previously mentioned factors.

Yes, of course, all of these things are estimates and there is wiggle room. However, that doesn't change the way MFP is meant to work/be used. It is meant for you to eat back intentional exercise calories unless you've used another method to calculate your daily/weekly calorie needs. I know everyone has a varying range of error when logging calories consumed/burned. That's the first suggestion when people think something's not working -- ensure that you are accurate with your calorie consumption and burns - which will take practice and time.

Edit: I'm saying this bc there seems to be consistent pervasive misunderstanding of eating back exercise calories - and NOT eating any of them back when the calorie goal set by MFP is already at a deficit is a great way to be undereating routinely, which isn't good for anyone.

Which again is dependent on accurate input of data which is very easy to not do. Undereating would be evident with a faster than planned weightloss which is corrected. Slower than planned weightloss is also corrected. It's all a matter of adjustments once someone has a month or 2 of data.

Bottom line is any calorie tracker whether it's MFP or something else is only as accurate in results as the data being input is

I am a data person, so I like the idea of picking the percentage of exercise calories you eat back, sticking with that for 4-6 weeks, then adjusting based on results.

My personal approach:

1. 47 year old female - 5' 4"
2. Starting weight 228, current weight 180, goal weight 148.
3. Activity level set at sedentary (I have a desk job).
4. Target weight loss started at 2 lbs/week, is currently 1.5 lbs/week and will drop to 1 lb/week then 0.5 lbs/week as I get closer to my goal weight.
5. Use Apple Watch synced with MFP to track intentional exercise (walking for the purpose of walking or mowing the lawn gets tracked but walking around the house doing laundry, etc does not).
6. Adjust exercise totals that don't make sense to me - ie, mowing the lawn with a total distance of 2.4 miles in 57 minutes gives me 2x the calories I get for walking 2.4 miles at a 3 mph pace (I think my Apple watch counts the vibration of the lawn mower as extra effort) so I adjust the calories for that activity in MFP to match what I would get for a "normal" walk.
7. Weigh/measure all calorie dense foods and most other foods as well.
8. Eat pretty much the same breakfast, lunch, and snacks most days so most calorie variability comes from dinners and that's where I focus most of my weighing/measuring efforts.
9. Target eating back 100% of my exercise calories but am usually ending the week up about 10% under total calorie goal.
10. Total average weight loss since starting weight has been 1.9 lbs/week, so I'm now considering an adjustment to be more intentional about eating back all my calories or dropping my target weight loss down to 1 lb/week a little earlier than I had planned.

Something that resonated with me was the saying "you can't exercise your way out of a bad diet". That is what had me focus more on tracking what I was putting in my body than what I was burning through exercise. One question to ask yourself is whether the calories/day you burn through exercise are where the real variability comes in for you. For myself, I've found that focusing the energy on being accurate about "calories in" has a bigger impact than nit picking my "calories out". Not that I don't play with it (as you can see above), but I consider that more of a fine tuning where tracking my intake is the big needle mover.

I fully understand how MFP's system works.

I also wonder if it's fundamentally flawed. Aside from all the confusion it seems to create among so many new users, there are a couple of big issues with it:

1. Estimates for calories burned can vary greatly. Admittedly, the same comment applies to every calculator which applies a generic 1.4 or 1.6 or whatever multiplier to your estimated BMR, but with MFP it's made more explicit, and the system encourages you to eat back that amount.

2. After exercise, you probably subconsciously do less NEAT during the rest of the day. It's called compensation. So even if you accurately estimate you burned an extra 500 calories during the workout, you may compensate by burning a few hundred less from NEAT later in the day. Some users say they eat back 50%, and that probably accounts for that. If you eat back 100%, and are a couch potato more than normal because the workout tired you out, you may actually be eating in a surplus now.

I track everything with MFP, and I also keep a spreadsheet of daily calories and net calories, which includes my conservative workout estimates. From that, I can calculate my TDEE, while factoring in 3500 for each pound lost YTD. What I find is my TDEE is more than 700 above MFP's estimate, and there's no way my workouts are 700 per day.

@PAV8888

- I choose Sedentary with MFP, which is definitely the right choice. I WFH, and most days I don't leave the house. I've no idea what my daily step count is, but it can't be all that high. Aside from my intentional workouts, I'm not active.

- I was referring to the compensatory effect of NEAT being reduced by exercise. I've seen conflicting studies on this. It seems like high intensity cardio is more likely to result in loss of NEAT than resistance training or low intensity cardio, and that fits with my personal experience. I've recently taken up a sporting activity on weekend mornings and I feel wiped after that for most of the day. I would not be surprised in the least if my NEAT went down, therefore eating back 100% of those activity calories (even if that estimate were accurate) would be a mistake. If you can find more data on this, that would be great. I've seen sites saying exercise reduces NEAT, then when trying to find the actual studies, one says it does, another says it doesn't.

- I have a couple of reasons to believe my RMR is higher than the statistical average. All calculators assume an average amount of muscle mass for someone my age and weight, but I'm sure I have higher than average muscle mass, which burns more calories. Also, I'm surely eating far more protein than average, which has a higher thermic effect, i.e. more calories burned to process it. Those two things probably add well over 100 calories per day to estimated RMR.

- You're absolutely right about the calories baked in to every hour by MFP, so you have to be careful when adding exercise calories to not double count those. Typically I look at the MET estimates for an activity, and if it's 3-6 say, I'll probably choose 3.5-4, then subtract the 1 which is already baked into MFP. The resulting number is usually a bit lower than the number MFP suggests for that exercise duration.

- I'm confident with the logging. Not saying I'm 100% accurate, but there's no way I'm accidentally over-counting by hundreds every day. I check packaging carefully against every entry I use.

- When looking at my YTD average calories, binge days skew that average higher. I'm sure you've seen the YT videos of people binging many thousands more calories in a day than normal, and tracking their stats after, and going 5,000 over in a day doesn't result in 1.5 pounds of fat gain. There's the thermic effect of processing all that, your body temp probably goes up, your NEAT goes up, etc. We've all been there I'm sure, where we take a few days break for whatever reason and definitely eat more than normal, and a week later it hasn't had the effect on our weight that the raw numbers suggest it should. I'm not saying to ignore those outlier days, I'm saying what we do consistently matters more.

Bottom line with all of this is that if you aren’t meeting your Fatloss goals and you’re eating back all your exercise calories then you may need to re think your equation.

@Retroguy2000 we cand/could have fun... but I am sure we're digressing a bit

For thread purposes: Goals have to actually be suitable and appropriate to begin with and then logging estimates are where we start. Beyond that adjustments have to be made. Both in terms of figuring out what goals can be achieved and in terms of what it will take to get there.

Retroguy2000 wrote: »

I choose Sedentary with MFP, which is definitely the right choice. I WFH, and most days I don't leave the house. I've no idea what my daily step count is, but it can't be all that high.

AF of 1.25 = MFP sedentary would be centered around 3500 steps / 35 minutes of moderate (MET 3) activity or equivalent level of expenditure from even more or less vigorous activity. By the time you're hitting 5,000 steps (50 minutes of MET 3.0) you would be getting to AF of 1.4 which is lightly active.

"Retroguy2000 wrote:

- I was referring to the compensatory effect of NEAT being reduced by exercise. I've seen conflicting studies on this. It seems like high intensity cardio is more likely to result in loss of NEAT than resistance training or low intensity cardio

I don't see how that can ever get universally quantified but your observation fits my personal experience. I would actually change it to include "challenging for each individual" level of activity. For example resistance training for myself would have similar effects to higher intensity cardio in terms of slowing me down the rest of the day. It is definitely the reason why I primarily engage in LISS activity... which can still provide one with remarkably positive health results--which is why I tend to pounce on people who dismiss simple walking especially for previously non active beginners.

"Retroguy2000 wrote:

therefore eating back 100% of those activity calories (even if that estimate were accurate) would be a mistake.

The effect is the same, I guess, but the error as you say yourself is not the exercise. it is the reduction in NEAT. The exercise still burned the calories. This is where the larger averages come into play. In the end we don't HAVE to be 100% accurate as long as the long term averages provide enough meaningful direction.

"Retroguy2000 wrote:

where we take a few days break for whatever reason and definitely eat more than normal, and a week later it hasn't had the effect on our weight that the raw numbers suggest it should. I'm not saying to ignore those outlier days, I'm saying what we do consistently matters more.

You may find it interesting to get one of the gadget watches and see what it "graphs" for you. There's quite a few not very expensive ones that will do the job without spending the $'s associate with the "big boys".

I prefer to think of my daily energy maintenance "point" as a bit of an elastic range. Definitely for myself, when balanced at maintenance there is both resistance to weight loss and to weight gain unless and until the resistance is overwhelmed by persistent and sufficiently large (but not too large) caloric adjustments.

And yes, in my case, it there is more resistance towards losing than towards gaining... as I am sure is the case for many on MFP.

It is almost fascinating to see "resting heart rate" increases and decreases correlate remarkably with logged caloric overages and deficits. Nail growing is another interesting one, especially when having an overage day after a prolonged deficit. My personal observation is that the **occasional** "extra food" or "not enough food" days are, to a substantial degree, going to be absorbed by the body's ability to adapt.

And yes this does argue that diet breaks and re-feeds make sense from the point of view of optimization, The question is whether they always make sense for the people involved. As what is optimal in the abstract is not always optimal for the individual.

Oh well.... hopefully all this is of some interest to someone!