Exercise calories

I've always eaten all of my carefully-estimated exercise calories, all through weight loss and 7+ years of maintenance since.

If someone does only a small amount of exercise, like half an hour of moderate activity 3 times a week or something, and is only trying for a slow weight loss rate in the first place, it's probably fine to let exercise calories increase the calorie deficit for faster weight loss, i.e., not eat them back.

At the other extreme, if someone does intense or lengthy exercise most days on top of shooting for the fastest weight loss rate (2 pounds or 1 kg per week), and doesn't eat back exercise calories . . . that can increase health risks, plus make it harder to stick with the routine for long enough to lose a meaningful total amount of weight. Too-fast weight loss can be dangerous.

In between those extremes, it's a judgement call: How much health risk do you want to take on, in order to lose weight faster? Personally, I don't love "bet my health" propositions, so I eat back exercise calories.

If the person set their MFP activity level with their exercise activity in mind, then logs exercise in addition to that, that would be double counting the exercise calories and would slow weight loss beyond what would be expected. The MFP activity level should be based on non-exercise activity, like job and home chores.

Yes, in theory you should. You certainly should if you're running a very agressive calorie deficit or if MFP gave you 1200 calories (female) or 1500 calories (male). But exercise calories are often grossly overstated, thus a bit of caution is necessary here. 600 calories for one workout sounds quite extreme. Can you tell us what you did and for how long? How were those calories measured? Maybe start with just half your exercise calories for now and observe for a month. If you lose faster than your goal then eat more. Losing slower (provided you're not on the lowest possible calorie amounts mentioned above) then eat a bit less.

CzMzX wrote: »

Thank you for the responses! I had no idea the community was so active; this is helpful! I like the idea of lean protein, fresh fruits, and small, simple carbs to replace burned calories.
I reported that I want to lose 2 pounds per week. I set up my goal as "lightly active". I've also tried to make my profile public if you want to view it. https://www.myfitnesspal.com/en/food/diary/CzMzX
Here is an image of the last two days of exercise for me. I use the Peloton app with a heart rate monitor to track the workouts.
This won't be typical for me as I've been on vacation and had some extra time to work out. I would agree these numbers shown under calories burned seem too high. When Health Connect by Android imports the workout into myfitnesspal, the calories burned numbers are significantly reduced; not sure why.
I think tracking my calories like this will be the key to success. Let me know what you think of my food diary calories.

Health Connect and MFP reconcile MFP's estimate of how many calories you'd burn (based on MFP profile settings) with what Health Connect sees.

Consider that MFP assumes you're burning calories 24 x 7. That would be the calories that burn merely to keep you alive in the world (your basal metabolic rate, BMR), but also the calories you'd expect to burn doing routine daily life stuff, from job to home chores and beyond.

Usually, the exercise calories a device estimates also include BMR, and maybe more. What MFP wants to add to your calorie goal is just the number of calories that the exercise adds to the background calorie burn of your BMR + average daily life stuff. That would be called the "net calories" from the exercise.

That "net calorie" number will be smaller than the gross calories that most devices report, because the gross includes BMR and sometimes daily life activity. That may be one reason for the difference you're seeing.

AnnPT77 wrote: »

CzMzX wrote: »

Thank you for the responses! I had no idea the community was so active; this is helpful! I like the idea of lean protein, fresh fruits, and small, simple carbs to replace burned calories.
I reported that I want to lose 2 pounds per week. I set up my goal as "lightly active". I've also tried to make my profile public if you want to view it. https://www.myfitnesspal.com/en/food/diary/CzMzX
Here is an image of the last two days of exercise for me. I use the Peloton app with a heart rate monitor to track the workouts.
This won't be typical for me as I've been on vacation and had some extra time to work out. I would agree these numbers shown under calories burned seem too high. When Health Connect by Android imports the workout into myfitnesspal, the calories burned numbers are significantly reduced; not sure why.
I think tracking my calories like this will be the key to success. Let me know what you think of my food diary calories.

Health Connect and MFP reconcile MFP's estimate of how many calories you'd burn (based on MFP profile settings) with what Health Connect sees.

Consider that MFP assumes you're burning calories 24 x 7. That would be the calories that burn merely to keep you alive in the world (your basal metabolic rate, BMR), but also the calories you'd expect to burn doing routine daily life stuff, from job to home chores and beyond.

Usually, the exercise calories a device estimates also include BMR, and maybe more. What MFP wants to add to your calorie goal is just the number of calories that the exercise adds to the background calorie burn of your BMR + average daily life stuff. That would be called the "net calories" from the exercise.

That "net calorie" number will be smaller than the gross calories that most devices report, because the gross includes BMR and sometimes daily life activity. That may be one reason for the difference you're seeing.

Yes, get your "exercise calories to be eaten back" from MFP, which uses net calories.

kshama2001 wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

CzMzX wrote: »

Thank you for the responses! I had no idea the community was so active; this is helpful! I like the idea of lean protein, fresh fruits, and small, simple carbs to replace burned calories.
I reported that I want to lose 2 pounds per week. I set up my goal as "lightly active". I've also tried to make my profile public if you want to view it. https://www.myfitnesspal.com/en/food/diary/CzMzX
Here is an image of the last two days of exercise for me. I use the Peloton app with a heart rate monitor to track the workouts.
This won't be typical for me as I've been on vacation and had some extra time to work out. I would agree these numbers shown under calories burned seem too high. When Health Connect by Android imports the workout into myfitnesspal, the calories burned numbers are significantly reduced; not sure why.
I think tracking my calories like this will be the key to success. Let me know what you think of my food diary calories.

Health Connect and MFP reconcile MFP's estimate of how many calories you'd burn (based on MFP profile settings) with what Health Connect sees.

Consider that MFP assumes you're burning calories 24 x 7. That would be the calories that burn merely to keep you alive in the world (your basal metabolic rate, BMR), but also the calories you'd expect to burn doing routine daily life stuff, from job to home chores and beyond.

Usually, the exercise calories a device estimates also include BMR, and maybe more. What MFP wants to add to your calorie goal is just the number of calories that the exercise adds to the background calorie burn of your BMR + average daily life stuff. That would be called the "net calories" from the exercise.

That "net calorie" number will be smaller than the gross calories that most devices report, because the gross includes BMR and sometimes daily life activity. That may be one reason for the difference you're seeing.

Yes, get your "exercise calories to be eaten back" from MFP, which uses net calories.

For clarity, MFP uses net calories when it syncs trackers.

In theory, it wants us to use net calories in manually logged exercise, too. But IMU the exercise database calories are gross calories. That overcounts exercise to some extent, but for most typical exercise intensity/duration/frequency situations, not by enough to stress over. Long, low intensity exercise is likely to be over-estimated in a more meaningful way by the exercise database - things like long, slow walking.

Retroguy2000 wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

But IMU the exercise database calories are gross calories.

It would make more sense that the entries are net, and in my experience, that seems to be the case.

e.g. a couple of the exercise entries I often enter are for weights and inline skating. Online gives a MET range of 3-6 and 7-14 respectively for those, and the MFP entries are around 3 and 7 for me respectively. Either they are gross calories but at the lowest part of the typical ranges, or they are net and a bit closer to the middle of the ranges, but still on the conservative side, which would make sense given the likely athletic ability of the average MFP user.

Regardless, as some of us have talked about before, it's a potential mistake to add back 100% of net calories burned in exercise even if that estimate is accurate, because the more vigorous the exercise, the more likely NEAT will be reduced for the rest of the day as the body compensates. So when I enter my estimates manually, I go a bit lower than the MFP estimate, to about 75% of it.

I think the MFP database calories are net as well. If I look at the calories for an activity in MapMyFitness, it is so much higher than the same thing in MFP, which I have attributed to the former using gross and the latter using net. Ditto for looking at a FitBit - but the calories when sent over to MFP via sync are less. There would need to be a similar adjustment in MFP for MFP database calories, and there isn't one.

When I swim or snowshoe I should use a 75% estimate as well, as my NEAT definitely does indeed decrease. Mild to moderate exercise, on the other hand, seems to invigorate me.