Exercise calories

I'm 67 and I eat all my exercise calories in maintenance. It keeps me from being over-hungry on days I am more active. I lost 50+ lbs. and have maintained that loss for about 10 years. As stated above, try eating back a percentage of the calories and see what happens. In my case I learned that I burn more than the norm for someone my age. it gives me a lot of flexibility. If you are not losing as expected, then eat less. If you intend to lose only half a pound a week for the last 5-15 pounds, then you do need to be really accurate in your calorie counting. Small errors can erase the 250 calorie deficit pretty easily.

What the research is saying, is that if you do a lot of additional exercise, the body compensates by decreasing NEAT while you rest and recover, or by becoming more efficient. So you shouldn't eat back 100% of exercise calories despite what MFP says, and frankly you shouldn't need to.

I don't quite understand why you continue to post this...let's see that citation...

I eat a full 400-500 calories MORE than myfitnespal or any other calculator says to eat. I've been logging food and purposeful exercise for 17 years on this site, so I'm pretty good at it. I use a digital food scale, I even weigh my vegetables in grams.

Yes, I always ate all my "exercise" calories on myfitnesspal. Could I be a Special Snowflake? Don't think so, I've read this same story repeatedly.

No matter which calculator is used, there is a pretty significant amount of user error with the input, but the offset of lowered NEAT really only comes into play with a too-aggressive calorie deficit. I would imagine 1460 calories for a women with this level of output/exercise probably wouldn't cause a significant calorie deviation due to adaptive thermogenesis - which is what you seem to be arguing here. I think she'd notice other issues, like fatigue and hunger.

She's going to have to run that data experiment.

No, I am not talking about adaptive thermogenesis after long term high calorie deficits. I'm talking about the rest of your day after exercise. Say you do an hour or two of something intense. You may rest and recover deliberately for hours after that, which means you're burning less than your baseline daily estimate for those hours, and you may limit movement subconsciously for more hours after that via less fidgeting etc. This lowers your daily NEAT. This is a common sense observation I'm sure we've all experienced. Haven't you?

Okay, so you burn maybe 25 fewer calories in the hour or two after exercise? Not really, because there is a post-exercise metabolic effect and most of the BMR calories were going to be "burned" anyway. Fidgeting for an hour? Maybe 20 calories? C'mon... that's a weak point.

Not only that but exercise increases energy levels long-term.

I absolutely move around more, and get more done when I'm exercising regularly.

Former pro bodybuilders I follow on YT talk about 50% as being a reasonable guideline for calories to eat back after exercise, and those guys have years of meticulous experience tracking this sort of thing.

Sure. That's super relevant to this menopausal light-exercising lady.

Is this when they're in a cut? I mean...so much I could argue here.

I am a menopausal lady and I've been meticulously logging for 17 years.

The OP literally describes a situation where they have inflated their estimate of exercise calories burned, which is a very good reason not to eat back 100% of that estimate when trying to lose weight. Don't you agree?

There are several different settings in MFP for Sedentary, Lightly Active, etc. I could pick Sedentary and eat 100% of exercise calories, or Active and eat 0%, or Lightly Active and eat 50%, and it would probably all come out around the same.

I agree with you on this part. Sort of.

I mean, when I first started losing weight I was using 600 calories-burned for an hour of Zumba or swimming. Was I actually using that many? Prolly not. No, I didn't math-out the BMR calories vs the strictly exercise calories - but I still lost the weight using my data consistently.

I stand by my points that there are too many variables and she's going to have to do the work with the numbers. We don't really know enough here to be making the statement that you made and with which I took issue:

you shouldn't eat back 100% of exercise calories despite what MFP says, and frankly you shouldn't need to.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it so just keep doing what you’re doing. Many people, including myself don’t eat back exercise calories I just figure my weekly exercise into my weekly TDEE. Plus you don’t need to drink that much water.

First, I think we're in pedantic mode here, going well beyond anything OP wants or need right now in order to succeed.

@liwo81, IMO what matters most is how fast you're losing recently. Now that you're down to the last few pounds (20 at most), slower loss is a good plan, and I think that's especially true if non-young. (For context, I'm 68, was 59-60 when I lost from class 1 obese to the healthy weight where I've been since.)

Quite a few people here (me included) think it's a health-promoting plan (for anyone) to lose no more than 0.5-1% of current weight weekly, with a bias toward the lower end of that unless severely obese and under close medical supervision for deficiencies or complications.

For you, that would be a maximum (at 0.5%) of 0.75 pounds per week. If slower is more sustainable for you for some reason, or you just prefer slower, slower is fine. If you're not losing as fast as that, and want to lose faster, then cutting calories is much more likely the answer than increasing them. (More exercise (within reason) or more daily life activity would be other options.)

There may be a narrow range of cases in which someone can lose at a more satisfying rate by eating more calories, but IMO it's a tough bet. If you're feeling draggy/fatigued, feeling persistently cold, and some things along those lines - or if you just want to experiment - you could try it. If you do, I'd suggest adding calories slowly, like 50-100 daily at first, another small increment a week or two later, etc., and see what happens.

Whether you get to any given weight loss rate (theoretically) "eating exercise calories" or "not eating exercise calories" is secondary to total calorie intake and calorie balance. The former's just a question of preferred accounting methods: Averaging exercise calories into a consistent daily goal on the one hand, eating more on exercise days on the other hand. The weekly average is more relevant to weight change over a period of time, and that would be about the same with either of those methods.

Accounting method may not be a meaningless factor, but it is secondary. (Possible meaningfulness: I'm glad I figured out how to estimate calorie needs with and without exercise calories, because (for example) it's been useful at times when I've had to stop or reduce my normal exercise routine for a few weeks due to illness, surgical recovery, injury, or whatever.)

If you're set at "active" in MFP because your exercise makes you active (not your job, home chores, or something routine like that), then your estimate already has you eating back exercise calories, in effect. They're just averaged into your daily goal, rather than accounted separately. Either can work.

Best wishes!

Use your weight loss experience to adjust your calorie intake, since you have a year's experience: That would be my main advice. Accounting method is more about preference than anything else.