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Interesting "sciency" post about eating your exercise calori

davidpm
davidpm Posts: 208 Member
edited October 2024 in Food and Nutrition
I leave no judgement nor weigh in on this debate all. I am just a bearer of helpful information:
http://caloriecount.about.com/eating-back-exercise-calories-ft35823

Replies

  • bcampbell54
    bcampbell54 Posts: 932 Member
    Bump this for later. I like these sciency things. With facts and stuff.
  • Brook70
    Brook70 Posts: 164
    Bump for later
  • impudentputz
    impudentputz Posts: 479 Member
    Is there a way to currently bump this to the top of the forum threads? hehe, makes sense to me
  • kyliecakes0405
    kyliecakes0405 Posts: 73 Member
    Thanks for sharing!
  • Brooke1542
    Brooke1542 Posts: 115 Member
    That's a good way to put it! Thanks for sharing!
  • davidpm
    davidpm Posts: 208 Member
    As a quick summary, it basically says that many people don't take into account the fact that you're replacing some activity with your exercise. If you had of stayed home and watched TV, you would still have burned some calories - maybe 80-100, so if you go to the gym and burn 300 calories on a treadmill, you're really only getting 200 calories or so "extra". MFP and other calorie counter sites already factor in that every day activity into your target numbers, so you're double counting a burn and going OVER your calories if you eat right up to your burn. It might be only 80-100 calories a day, but over a week, that's 550-700 extra calories.
  • nanodot
    nanodot Posts: 154 Member
    Interesting. It makes a good point that you need to subtract resting calories from exercise calories to get the net.

    However, I never eat back my exercise calories at all. I also don't purposefully eat carbs before or after a workout. I want to burn last year's cake, not this morning's bagel.

    I can hike up mountains on 50 carbs a day, no problem.
  • rainbowbow
    rainbowbow Posts: 7,490 Member
    Edit--- gotcha with the amount your body would have burned had you not worked out. Seems like 500 calories a week isn't that big of a deal. NOM NOM NOM
  • davidpm
    davidpm Posts: 208 Member
    Too bad MyFitnessPal already takes the amount of calories you burn during the day into account and THEN gives you a deficit. The way MyFitnessPal is designed to work already gives you a deficit and the calories burned are MENT to be eaten.

    Exactly, it does. It assumes that you'll probably watch some TV on an average night. But if you don't and go to the gym, it never gets rid of those calories that it assumed for you.

    Simple example: Your BMR is 1700 calories. MFP assumes that you'll watch some TV at night and that's about 80 calories in an hour, so your number goes up to 1780. You decide to skip TV and go to the gym and burn 500 calories so MFP adds 500 more calories = 2280.... but you only burned your BMR plus your exercise... that's 2200, not 2280.

    MFP and other calorie counters don't remove calories it already assumed that you used when you replace it with something else.

    It's a minor point, but it might help people to refine and eat maybe 100-150 below your total net and account for that.
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