Is this a good thing?

meaganwalters01
meaganwalters01 Posts: 3 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
This is my first day logging food and I'm unsure if my result below is a good thing or not?? Should I be eating a bit more perhaps - I felt like I ate plenty today!
Calorie Goal = 1400
Calories eaten = 1309
Less exercise = 1280
Calories remaining 1371!

Replies

  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 10,079 Member
    Yes, looks about right. The calorie goal MFP gives you is without exercise but only with day to day activity. If you're sitting all day you'd likely be sedentary. A teacher would be a lot more active, a construction worker likely very active. If you eat back the calories mfp gives you for exercise then you're still at your calorie goal. With one caveat: exercise calories are often overstated. Why not start eating half of them and then look in at least one menstrual cycle, or 4-6 weeks where you are. If you didn't eat those calories then that's pretty much the same as only eating 1309-1280 = 29 calories. Btw, what did you do to get so many calories? Did you run a marathon?
  • meaganwalters01
    meaganwalters01 Posts: 3 Member
    Thanks for the clarification. I've been catching up on housework today, nothing too exciting but I managed to clock up just under 16,000 steps. My job is quite sedentary so I make up for it on weekends
  • paperpudding
    paperpudding Posts: 9,348 Member
    1280 is a lot of exercise calories.,

    You are saying you burnt 1280 calories on top of your daily activity level?

    What exercise did you do and for how long to come to that figure?
  • poodle_whisper
    poodle_whisper Posts: 36 Member
    16000 steps would not burn over 12k calories. i think you are mistaken on your exercise calorie burn.
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 14,465 Member
    edited February 3
    16000 steps would move someone from the sedentary multiplier on MFP (used to be 1.25, I haven't double checked if this continues to be true in 2025+) to about the level of the top of the MFP very active setting multiplier (used to be 1.8).

    While we can opine that 1280 is a high enough number that it warrants a double check, whether this makes 1280 Cal likely or not cannot be opined on the strength of the information that we have.

    For example you can bet you little kittens that it would have been a lower than true number in my own case 10.5 years ago when I first started using MFP.

    That said activities such as these (especially if mixed mode, difficult for watch like devices to detect, potentially heavily influenced by heart rate that may or may not correctly correspond to caloric output) do need to be validated over time.

    That said. Whether the1280 is really 1280, 980, or 680, is not certain. But for sure it ain't 8.80 eithet Not unless one ties their watch to the dog's (or cat's) tail and then induces them to move it from side to side rhythmically adding steps.

    So yes. A single high exercise day when one is not famished doesn't *need* to be made up. But systematic undereating over and above reasonable weight deficit targets in a quest to go faster also does not tend to end well.

    MFP was envisioned as a ledger where actual exercise calories are eaten back.

    And the only way to figure out "actual" for one's self is to make reasonable starting guesses, keep track, and evaluate progress after a while.

    A reasonable guess when looking at 1280 for housework is probably neither 1280 nor zero.

    Hint: searching for MET values and housework indicates an intensity similar to a moderate-ish walk. Walks are a long duration relatively lower intensity activity--compared to running for example. To me it is perfectly reasonable to accept the complete adjustment from a connected watch, as it is supposed to equalize and adjust values with MFP at the tdee level. And then evaluate how well this worked by observing results over time. But how reasonable an approach that would be would depend on the size of deficit I'm targeting and on my TDEE i.e. on my margin for error.

    That said a quick sanity check could be run by evaluating the net calories one would have spent walking for an equal amount of time. That would be a smaller number and I would consider that to be the least amount of sensible eat back)

    Hint #2 @yirara sort of told you the same thing using a slightly less nuanced version of the same rule of thumb!
  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 10,079 Member
    PAV8888 wrote: »
    Hint #2 @yirara sort of told you the same thing using a slightly less nuanced version of the same rule of thumb!

    Ehm yes.. I'm not always quite as nuanced as PAV8888 😬❤️
  • oakster69
    oakster69 Posts: 82 Member
    meaganwalters01 wrote: »
    This is my first day logging food and I'm unsure if my result below is a good thing or not?? Should I be eating a bit more perhaps - I felt like I ate plenty today!
    Calorie Goal = 1400
    Calories eaten = 1309
    Less exercise = 1280
    Calories remaining 1371!

    I would make sure that the calories for exercise are only for exercise that is not normal movement for the day, and doesnt include your everyday calorie use. I am fat and old, but my excercise is normally in the 300 to 400 calorie range, but I only track it for my walking/cardio. I dont track weight lifting. just want to make sure that you are not using calorie burn from a device like a Fit Bit or Apple Watch to get total calorie burn for the exercise.

  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 35,211 Member
    edited February 4
    OP, if you got those calories from a tracker synced to MFP, and all your MFP profile entries are correct, I'd say you could eat them back, as a starting position. Once you've followed the recommended calories for 4-6 weeks (or a full menstrual cycle for people who have those), you may need to adjust based on actual results.

    If all those estimates are correct - which is a good question, and a little complicated - then you'd be undereating significantly if you don't eat at least some of those calories . . . again, assuming that's an adjustment from a synced tracker you wear nearly 24x7, not exercise you typed in MFP by hand. If it's the latter, we'd need to know more.

    PAV made some good observations earlier that I agree with, like whether this big batch of extra calories turns out to be routine, vs. an unusual day. We don't need to over-react to an unusual day.
    oakster69 wrote: »
    meaganwalters01 wrote: »
    This is my first day logging food and I'm unsure if my result below is a good thing or not?? Should I be eating a bit more perhaps - I felt like I ate plenty today!
    Calorie Goal = 1400
    Calories eaten = 1309
    Less exercise = 1280
    Calories remaining 1371!

    I would make sure that the calories for exercise are only for exercise that is not normal movement for the day, and doesnt include your everyday calorie use. I am fat and old, but my excercise is normally in the 300 to 400 calorie range, but I only track it for my walking/cardio. I dont track weight lifting. just want to make sure that you are not using calorie burn from a device like a Fit Bit or Apple Watch to get total calorie burn for the exercise.

    If the OP has a fitness tracker device synced to MFP, a tracker they wear close to 24x7, that sync process takes care of making sure that calories are added when the tracker sees more calorie expenditure than MFP originally estimated based on MFP profile settings, and only adding net calories not gross exercise calories. If the person has negative adjustments turned on in MFP - a good idea IMO - it will also subtract calories if the tracker sees the person moving less than MFP initially estimated. The calories the tracker sees could be formal exercise, or it could be daily life stuff.

    Everyday calorie use should be included in the calculations somewhere. MFP includes them in its initial estimate based on demographic data plus what the person puts in their MFP activity level setting.
    What shouldn't be done is to include planned exercise in MFP activity level, then log that same exercise manually: That would be double counting the exercise.

    It can be fine to use an activity tracker's calorie estimate for manually logged exercise. What's important there is to recognize that what we ideally want to add is net calories, not gross calories. That is, we don't want to double count basal metabolic rate (BMR) or the average daily life movement calories when we add the exercise. Some trackers will provide a calorie figure for exercise that's net of BMR. It's somewhat individual, but that's probably arithmetically close enough to a reasonable exercise calorie estimate for typical half hour to hour workouts a few times a week.

    Using the tracker's estimate will quite possibly be more reasonable - closer to accurate - than the estimate we'd get from just logging the exercise minutes in MFP and using the MFP default exercise calorie estimates. How true that is does vary by exercise type, though. The MFP estimating process is research-based, too, but the implementation of it has some pitfalls IMO.
  • lynn_glenmont
    lynn_glenmont Posts: 10,122 Member
    poodle_whisper wrote: »
    16000 steps would not burn over 12k calories. i think you are mistaken on your exercise calorie burn.

    It's 1200 calories, not 12k calories. Could be perfectly reasonable, depending on what OP weighs.
  • meaganwalters01
    meaganwalters01 Posts: 3 Member
    Thanks all - my Fitbit is synced to MFP so my steps recorded were counted as exercise. Mon - Fri I have a sedentary job so my steps counted are not as high as on weekends when I'm always busy and moving around a lot.
  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 10,079 Member
    It's possible that TO has a much higher than average exercise heartrate, and that would give crazy calorie burns if Fitbit has not changed it algorithm since last i used one. @meaganwalters01 what have you been doing exactly to get these high calorie burns?
  • fletcher180
    fletcher180 Posts: 1 Member
    Housework, great way to burn calories. Your body keeps moving from task to task. Continual motion causes the calorie burn. Great job.
  • springlering62
    springlering62 Posts: 9,020 Member
    I can easily turn an Apple Watch move ring if I’m cleaning house, and for that simple reason I’ll often vacuum or pick up when it’s not ecessary just to get my *kitten* off the sofa.

    But, by the same token, I was cleaning house weekly when I was well into obese territory and had two kids, a pair of cats and four dogs to chase after.

    Be careful of counting housework and chores you already do regularly as calorie burns. Some people here do it successfully, but a lot just don’t, and don’t understand why they’re not losing.

    I don’t know at all how Fitbit works. My daughter has one and uses MFP to lose and maintain successfully. I love my Apple Watch because (supposedly) it “learns” you and recombobulates to adjust burns as you get smaller, or more efficient. For example, I’ve lost 30 calories per hour of swimming as I get better at it. And yet the blinking watch still calls it “swimming, slowly, light effort”. 🤬

    Fitbit users, does Fitbit readjust, too?

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