Are you exercise calories?

Rauhis wrote: »

I´m sure there has been lots of discussion about exercise calories, but I´m still uncertain. For example today I have eaten 1500 calories (my goal is usually 1800) and exercised 450 calories. How much should I eat more? Or do I just go to sleep...

If base calories didn't include an assumption of exercise (in MFP activity level setting), then the theoretically correct answer would be to eat an accurate estimate of exercise calories. That is what I did during weight loss (2015-16) and nearly 8 years of maintenance since.

That said, two things:

1. 450 calories of exercise is a fairly high amount, but it could be accurate depending on your current size, plus the exercise type, duration, and intensity.

For me when I started losing, 450 calories would've been around an hour of fairly intense exercise (rowing, spin class), at 5'5", age 59, female, and just over the line into class 1 obese. I'd been quite active for a dozen years at that point, so my fitness level was perhaps surprisingly good (exercise capable) even at that weight.

I was pretty conservative about estimating exercise calories, and tried to identify the most likely to be accurate method of estimating each different exercise type.

I also used the commonly-recommended approach here of following the MFP calorie goal plus exercise for multiple weeks (4-6 weeks or whole menstrual cycles), then adjusting calorie goal based on my real-world results. To simplify the arithmetic of that, it can be helpful to consistently eat some standard percent of one's exercise calories, and eat close to the MFP goal plus that amount of exercise calories.

2. The ". . . should I just go to sleep" raises a question in my mind, but I admit I'm speculating when I say that. If that amount of exercise was really fatiguing for you, that kind of pattern might be counter-productive. If we're fatigued, we can tend to rest more and move less, so burn fewer calories overall than expected. Essentially, dragging through daily life can cancel out some of the exercise calorie burn, in effect. The right "dose" of exercise is a good thing, overdoing for current fitness level isn't . . . even for fitness improvement, not just for weight management.

If you're thinking about sleep rather than eating just because it's almost bedtime, that's a different matter. Keep in mind that even though MFP resets calories at midnight, our bodies don't. You can use up however many exercise calories you want to eat in the next day or few, no harm no foul.

It's OK to let exercise calories cause faster weight loss as long as it isn't toooooo fast. ("Too fast" can be counterproductive through fatigue or eventual deprivation-triggered over-eating, let alone increasing health risks.) Without knowing how fast you're trying to lose, I don't know whether you have an aggressive loss rate goal or not.

If you're trying to lose more than 0.5-1% of current weight per week, and you didn't assume exercise into your MFP activity level, I'd suggest eating at least a fair fraction of your exercise calories, whether you eat them today, in the next couple of days, or even save them up for the weekend. (Average calories over the week can be a reasonable guide.)

Best wishes!