Opting out of exercise calories?

Hi @AlphaGirlNo1
it depends on a lot of things. Most of all on the method used to determine your food intake. There are calorie calculators that take your exercise into account when giving you a calorie goal, and there are those that don't. MFP is the latter. That means, in order to use MFP as it's intended to be used you should log your exercises and at least eat back a part of those calories. Then you'll still lose at the rate you've chosen.

You have a calorie goal of 1400 calories. You don't provide any additional information, but lets just say you chose 1lbs per week loss. Now you exercise for 300 calories per day. This is pretty much the same as only eating 1100 calories: you'd lose a lot faster, you might have literally no energy because even small children eat more than that, and you might binge and give up.

If your goal is 1400 calories and you exercise for 300 calories each day and you ate 1700 each day you'd still lose 1lbs per week, but have more energy.

of course, calories for exercise are often grossly overstated, and in order to fuel your body properly but not eat too much it's probably a good idea to start with a part of the exercise calories and check in 4-6 weeks how fast your weightloss really is, then adjust the food intake.

SafariGalNYC wrote: »

yirara wrote: »

Hi @AlphaGirlNo1
it depends on a lot of things. Most of all on the method used to determine your food intake. There are calorie calculators that take your exercise into account when giving you a calorie goal, and there are those that don't. MFP is the latter. That means, in order to use MFP as it's intended to be used you should log your exercises and at least eat back a part of those calories. Then you'll still lose at the rate you've chosen.

I’ve never been able to find literature - as to how MFP usage is intended.. is it on the website or app?

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

SafariGalNYC wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

SafariGalNYC wrote: »

yirara wrote: »

Hi @AlphaGirlNo1
it depends on a lot of things. Most of all on the method used to determine your food intake. There are calorie calculators that take your exercise into account when giving you a calorie goal, and there are those that don't. MFP is the latter. That means, in order to use MFP as it's intended to be used you should log your exercises and at least eat back a part of those calories. Then you'll still lose at the rate you've chosen.

I’ve never been able to find literature - as to how MFP usage is intended.. is it on the website or app?

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

Thanks! I’ve read that.. I guess I always thought of TDEE as optional instead of a mandate or intention per se. 🤷‍♀️

It is optional, in the larger sense: Either way can work fine. But I think that article makes it clear that the MFP software's design intention was to estimate base calories (without intentional exercise) then add exercise calories when exercise happens.

That doesn't mean the software can't be used successfully in other ways, as long as person understands what they're doing and why.

There's so much confusion (in questions here) about adding exercise calories. Conceptually, it's pretty simple, right? To lose weight, we need to eat fewer calories than we burn in any and all ways. Exercise is just one of the ways we burn calories. How we do the accounting for the calories can vary, and we can still be successful.

SafariGalNYC wrote: »

@AnnPT77 agree re weight loss. Also agree w @yirara - one of the few people that mentions how much exercise calories can be overestimated with current design.

Of course exercise calories can be over-estimated. So can base calorie needs. It's all estimates all the way, including food logging. Close is good enough to be workable.

METS, the general method MFP uses to estimate exercise (when manually logged) is a research-based method, but it's a method that suits some types of exercise better than it suits others - better for exercises where a good share of the work is moving one's body weight through space, against gravity. The actual METS multiplier values vary in quality, because the underlying research on each exercise type varies in quality, besides.

For almost any exercise, there are better and worse ways to estimate the calorie expenditure.

People who sync a good brand/model fitness tracker are leveraging the research the company used in designing its algorithms. (No, they don't necessarily all use heart rate, at least not heart rate alone, to estimate every exercise type, at least among the brands/models that know what exercise is being performed. But heart rate is also better for estimating some exercise types than others, too. (Most likely to be close for moderate steady-state cardio in someone who knows their actual max heart rate, rather than just an age estimate.)

For exercises that have a narrow band of efficiency (like cycling), power metering can provide reasonable calorie estimates.

There are considerations, but I think we over-react here to the difficulty of estimating exercise calories because the software expects us to estimate it explicitly. I'm not sure it's really any more fraught than estimating base calories using a statistical estimate of average BMR, then applying one of a small number of arithmetic multipliers based on an activity level setting.

TDEE calculators, ones that include exercise in the activity level setting, are using some statistical average amount of calories for an exercise frequency/duration, and generally making the assumption that all exercises of the same frequency/duration burn around the same number of calories. That's pretty approximate!

ETA: BTW, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with using MFP differently than its design intent, as long as a person makes the necessary adjustments to do so rationally. Software can be flexible. As a former software designer/developer myself, I'd consider it a good thing if software allows multiple methods of use, and works OK with them.

Hobartlemagne wrote: »

I eat back exercise calories as a way of fixing my macros.
I almost always have a protein drink at the end of the day to make up the calorie surplus.

Did you mean if you are a bit low you drink a shake to keep the number at goal? Sounds like a plan. Some people hate it but I like the idea of rewarding good habits with something I enjoy. I just to hit the gym to absorb my beer calories for a night out. It worked when I was younger. I finally have given up beer as a lifestyle.