Eating Calories

From past experience I have learned that you need to eat at least 1/2 of the calories you burn during exercise. There was a time during my journey that I wasn't eating them at all and I stopped losing weight.
On the flip side of that, I have also heard that if your activity level is VERY high, you should east most of your exercise calories. Since everyone is different, you have to find out what works for you.
Good Luck!

Yes, according to MFP you are allowed to eat back your exercise calories. I choose not to. Depending on how many exercise calories I burned, I usually only eat back part of them. If I'm hungry I eat; if I'm not I don't. Your body will tell you what you should do.

From past experience I have learned that you need to eat at least 1/2 of the calories you burn during exercise. There was a time during my journey that I wasn't eating them at all and I stopped losing weight.
On the flip side of that, I have also heard that if your activity level is VERY high, you should east most of your exercise calories. Since everyone is different, you have to find out what works for you.
Good Luck!

This is my way too. If you're unconvinced, I tested the theory! See my blog (link below)

In the long run, you are better off eating them, from a nutritional and atheletic stand point. Not eating them won't make you lose weight faster and from my experience leads many people to stall in weight loss due to under eating. The way I look at it, if you want to be an athlete, you have to train like one. Now there are approaches where you don't have to worry about eating them back. I use the Katch McArdle formula (use can also use the Harris Benedict Formula) which takes your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) or the amount of calories you would burn in 24 hours of sleeping and is multilpied against a total daily energy expended (TDEE ) factor to get caloric needs for the day. This approach allows you to eat more calories per day and the deficit is factored over the week.


For example if your BMR is 1500 and lets say you workout 5 days a week @ 1 hour a pop. Your TDEE factor is 1.55 (link below provides good information on this). This means my TDEE is 1500 * 1.55 = 2325. This means on average, your body will burn 2325 calories a day; essentially, this is your maintenance calories. To lose weight, you then add a deficit of 500 to obtain your caloric needs (which would be 1825).

I have used this approach to get me from 18% body fat down to 10.5%. The advantage to this method is two fold; first, you don't have to worry about catching up on your calories because you workout later at night. Second, the additional calories will help your body maintain muscle mass which is crucial. Mass muscle is a driving factor for metabolism and caloric needs. And if you can eat more calories, the less likely you will gain weight when you have a bad day or two (especially with the holidays up coming).

Hope this helps. If you want more information or have more questions feel free to post or send me a message. In reality, 1200 calories isn't really enough for the majority of people and that becomes more apparent when you look at all the threads regarding plateaus (at least in my opinion).



http://www.shapefit.com/basal-metabolic-rate.html

http://www.cordianet.com/calculator.htm