Can't get on board with eating MORE calories...

Personally, on my second week of doing MFP faithfully and working out, I was coming in way under my calorie count, and lost no weight. I upped my calories (by adding healthy stuff of course) and ate smaller meals and more snacks throughout the day and I lost 3 pounds that week. It seems as though it worked for me.

Can't hurt to try, can it? It's only 300 more calories. That's about a half pound a week. Try it for 4 weeks. If you are right and it'll make you gain, the most you should gain (in real weight) is 2lbs.

BUT I bet you are wrong and that it will help you lose....

You should try the more calories thing... If you aren't eating enough, your body goes into starvation mode and holds on to everything you put in it.

Try it and if you start gaining or don't see results, revisit it

certainly has worked for me:

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/3047-700-calories-a-day-and-not-losing

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/175241-a-personal-view-on-exercise-cals-and-underfeeding

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/blog/ladyhawk00/view/activity-level-and-logging-exercise-125513

Depends on what you set as your lifestyle type and workouts. But as a rule MFP calculates a sufficient deficit in calories to loose weight without depriving you body of necessary calories. As you loose weight your daily calories will decrease as your body will need less to maintain itself.

For me, I am finding that it isn't so much a calories in/calories out thing...

I was stuck and started looking at information in the community from other members and noticed that folks were netting more calories that I was. I was always under the impression that net calories needed to be as low as possible, even negative to really lose weight. I kept them low low low. Then I see that folks keep the net around 1200-1400... and they still lose.

So, I decided to see what would happen. I upped my net calories through a combination of not working out so hard and eating what I normally eat and voila! I lost ....

Not sure if that will help.... But the body needs fuel to function and it can't feel like its starving... otherwise, it will hold on to every thing!

I also have PCOS. I eat 1350 calories before exercice. Because of PCOS, I lose weight really slowly but I still lose. Also I am 4'11'' 3/4 and 124 pounds. I am sure you need more than 1200 calories. At first you might gain a pound or 2 but your body will get use to it and you will start to lose again. Also for PCOS, A low carb diet work great.

Hi,

I've been overweight the past 15 or so years. I'm really dedicated to losing now but I'm having a hard time with the whole calories thing. I know losing is a simple equation of calories in/calories out. That's why I can't figure out this whole, "eat more to lose more" thing. Is it true? Has anyone seen it work? I have been keeping to 1200 cal/day and haven't lost much. MFP says I should be eating more like 1500. I'm nervous to try more calories for fear of gaining. I have been diagnosed with PCOS which means at this point gaining is extra easy and losing is extra hard.

I guess I'm just looking for some support on the higher calorie thing.

Thanks for listening to me ramble...

-Beth

You have to eat enough to not be in starvation mode, sure you'll eventually lose weight while starving but its not good weight loss that will stay off. The idea is to feed your body and stay within a healthy defict for you body. IE your net (calories in minus exercise) should be more then enough to keep your body energized and running.

Its been a challenge for me to eat the amount of calories needed including my exercise calories and I don't always manage it though I try to stay within 50-100 of what my goal net is. I try to fit in healthier snacks to bump it up, like a tbsp of peanut butter or a handful of almonds.

"OK, this will be long. Please read it if you are confused. Disclaimer: I am not a dietician or a doctor, just a successful loser and maintainer, who has consulted both doctors and dieticians.

Question #1:

Should I eat all my calories?

Yes. MFP is already figuring a deficit for you to lose weight. This deficit is based on what you need to eat based on your everyday activity, not counting exercise. In the end, it's all about "net calories" (you can view yours under reports)

Example: you need to eat 2,000 calories to maintain your current weight (random number)
MFP will tell you to eat 1,500 to lose one pound per week (500x7=3500=one pound loss).

Let's say you exercise, and burn 500 additional calories.
UH-OH, now you are at a 1,000 calorie a day deficit. You need 2,000 calories to maintian, are already restricted to 1500, so now your net calories are a 1,000 a day. This is starvation central. Your body, which is very good at keeping you alive, will store and save calories. You WILL stop losing weight. You WILL want to throw your scale out the window.

Eat your exercise calories. At least eat most of them.

Question #2:
I'm eating 1200 calories, I feel like crap and I'm not losing weight. What gives?

Answer:
Run, don't walk, to "tools" and use the BMR calculator. Please, please, please, eat at least your BMR calories every day. You might lose weight more slowly, but you will still lose, and you will not longer feel a sudden urge to fall over every time you do, well, anything.

Question #3:
I'm doing "everything right" and the scale won't move.

Answer #1: The scale is the devil. Step away from the scale. Buy a tape measure, notice how your clothes are (probably) fitting better. Muscle is more dense than fat, and takes up less space on your body. More muscle on your body will make the scale freeze or (gasp) move upward.

Answer #2: You're not being honest. In order for this to work, you must record every morsel of food that goes in your body. Also, if you ride a stationary bike for 30 minutes and barely break a sweat and can still chatter on your cell phone (OK, that's my personal gym pet peeve) then you're probably not working "vigorously". Don't overestimate your exercise calories. (this was a big mistake I made in the past.)

Answer #3: Your body might be re-adjusting. How you feel is the most important mark of progress. It's very easy to fixate on numbers, but feeling better really should be its own reward.

Question #4:
So, if I'm eating my exercise calories, what's the point of exercise?

Answer: (warning: extremely opinionated answer ahead)
You don't. You can lose weight through diet alone. But, then you will be skinny and flabby. Is a model skinnier than me? OH, YES! Is she healthier than me? probably NOT. She couldn't survive the hour-long spin class that I take three times a week. Trust me. Her skin is a mess, she smokes, and she looks like crap in person. (this is a generalization. I don't hate models, but this is their lifestyle. . .I used to be a "dresser" at shows, and I saw a lot of "behind the scenes" stuff.
"

I didn't lose on 1200/day. When I adjusted my settings (from sedentary to active) AND started eating my exercise calories (avg 1400 - 2000 calories per day), the weight started to go down. When I cleaned up my diet (got rid of processed foods), the weight REALLY started to drop (3 lbs last week - as opposed to less than 1lb per week I had been losing).

I was eating too little for my body at 1200 calories and plateaued- didn't lose an ounce for 2 months. I slowly worked my way up to 1700 calories and I am losing again. So yes, you need to eat to lose. Your body hangs on to every calorie when you starve it.

I have just upped my calories to 3000. Every time I have upped my calories, I kept losing more. It's all about basal metabolic rates and total daily energy expended (to form a proper deficit) but with PCOS there is a twist (my wife has it). PCOS' twist is you need a low carb diet (as confirmed by my wife's OBGYN). This doesn't mean you have a calorie intolerance.

So if you BMR is 1500 calories (about average for many of the women I have helped) and you live a sedentary lifestyle your TDEE equals 1500 * 1.2 (1.2 is your TDEE multiplier according to the katch mcardle formula; this is how I figure out my calories and has gotten me down to 11% body fat)

1500*1.2 = 1800

Add your deficit = 1800-500 = 1300.

1300 in this case would be your caloric needs until you add in exercise. Lets say you exercise and average about 5 days a week for an hour a day. That means, you would have to add in those calories to supply your body with enough fuel for energy and to reduce muscle loss. So then it would be...

1300+500 = 1800 calories.

Now this means on days you workout, you should eat back your exercise calories.

The second approach is adding exercise into the equation (making your lifestyle moderately active as opposed to sedentary to aim for a specific daily calorie goal and NOT eat back exercise calories).

so it would be 1500*1.55 = 2325 - 500 = 1825.

Both about the same answer and both will provide good results. Remember, food is fuel so if you don't have enough of it, your body will hold onto whatever it can. And in this case to cope with PCOS, you would go into your goals, do a custom setup and adjust your carbs to 30%, your proteins to 40% and your fats to 30%. You monitor this for a few weeks, if there is no weight loss, may reduce your carbs a bit more and increase protein (as it's the second fuel source in your body).

The biggest advice I can give you, stop being afraid that your weight might increase weight. Weight loss isn't linear and it takes time to learn what you need to do for weight loss and muscle retention. Doing something for a week isn't enough time for your body to adjust (it should be a month).

"I still see many people that are confused or "question" the idea of eating your exercise calories. I wanted to try (as futile as this may turn out to be) to explain the concept in no uncertain terms. I'll save the question of "eating your exercise calories" for the end because I want people to understand WHY we say to do this.

NOTE: I'm not going to use a lot of citation in this, but I don't want people thinking this is my opinion, I have put much careful research into it, most of which is very complicated and took a long time for me to sift through and summarize, and thanks to my chemical engineering backgroud I have the tools to read clinical studies and translate them (somewhat) into more human terms. Some of this information comes from sources I can't forward because they are from pay sites (like New England Journal of Medicine), so you can ask for anything, but I may or may not be able to readilly provide it for you (I can always tell you where to go if you want to though).

I'll break it down into 3 sections.
Section 1 will be our metabolic lifecycle or what happens when we eat and how our body burns fuel.
Section 2 will be what happens when we receive too much, too little, or the wrong kind of fuel.
Section 3 will be the steps needed to bring the body to a healthy state and how the body "thinks" on a sympathetic level (the automatic things our body does like digestion, and energy distribution).

Section 1:
Metabolism, in "layman's" terms, is the process of taking in food, breaking it down into it's components, using the food as fuel and building blocks, and the disposal of the poisons and waste that we ingest as part of it. Metabolism has three overall factors, genetics, nutrition, and environment. So who we are, what we eat, and how we live all contribute to how our metabolism works. You can control 2 of these 3 factors (nutrition, environment).
When you eat food, it is broken down into it's component parts. Protein, vitamins and minerals are transported to the cells that need them to build new cells or repair existing cells. Fats(fatty acid molecules) and carbohydrates are processed (by 2 different means) and either immediately burned or stored for energy. Because the body doesn't store food in a pre-digested state, if you eat more carbs and fat then you need immediately, the body will save them for later in human fat cells (adipose tissue). This is important to realize because even if you eat the correct number of calories in a 24 hour period, if you eat in large quantities infrequently (more then you can burn during the digestion process), your body will still store the extra as fat and eliminate some of the nutrients. (Side note: this is why simple or processed carbs are worse for you compared with complex carbs)

Section 2:
The human body has a set metabolic rate (based on the criteria stated above), this rate can be changed by overall nutritional intake over a period of time, or by increasing activity levels also over a period of time (the exact amount of time for sustained increase in metabolic rates is the subject of some debate, but all studies agree that any increase in activity level will increse the metabolism).
It is important to note that obesity does not drasticly change the level of metabolic process, that means that if you become obese, you don't burn a higher fat percentage just because you have more to burn.
The balance of incomming fuel vs the amount of fuel the body uses is called maintenance calories, or the amount of calories it takes to run your body during a normal day (not including exercise or an extremely lethargic day). The metabolism is a sympathetic process, this means it will utilize lower brain function to control it's level, it also means it can actively "learn" how a body is fitness wise, and knows approximately how much energy it needs to function correctly. It also means automatic reactions will happen when too much or too little fuel is taken in. Too much fuel triggers fat storage, adipose tissue expands and fat is deposited, also free "fat" cells (triglycerides) will circulate in the blood stream (HDL and LDL cholesterol). Too little fuel (again, over an extended period) triggers a survival mode instinct, where the body recognizes the lack of fuel comming in and attempts to minimize body function (slowing down of non-essential organ function) and the maximization of fat storage. It's important to note that this isn't a "switch", the body does this as an ongoing analysis and will adjust the levels of this as needed (there is no "line" between normal and survival mode.).
When you're activity level increases, the human body will perform multiple functions, first, readily available carbohydrates and fats are broken down into fuel, oxydized, and sent directly to the areas that need fuel, next adipose (body) fat is retreived, oxydized, and transported to the areas it is needed for additional fuel, 3rd (and this is important), if fat stores are not easilly reachable (as in people with a healthy BMI where adipose fat is much more scarce), muscle is broken down and used for energy. What people must realize is that the metabolism is an efficiency engine, it will take the best available source of energy, if fat stores are too far away from the systems that need them or too dense to break down quickly, then it won't wait for the slower transfer, it will start breaking down muscle (while still breaking down some of that dense fat as well).

Section 3:
The wonderful part of the human metabolic system is it's ability to adapt and change. Just because your body has entered a certain state, doesn't mean it will stay that way. The downfall to this is that if organs go unused over a long period, they can lose functionality and can take years to fully recover(and sometimes never).
As long as there is no permenant damage to organ function, most people can "re-train" their metabolism to be more efficient by essentially showing it (with the intake of the proper levels and nutritional elements) that it will always have the right amount and types of fuel. This is also known as a healthy nutritional intake.
Going to the extreme one way or the other with fuel consumption will cause the metabolism to react, the more drastic the swing, the more drastic the metabolism reacts to this (for example, a diet that limits fat or cabohydrate intake to very low levels). In general terms, the metabolism will react with predictable results if fuel levels remain in a range it associates with normal fuel levels. If you raise these fuel levels it will react by storing more fat, if you lower these fuel levels, it will react by shutting down processes and storing fat for the "upcomming" famine levels. The most prominent immediate issues (in no particular order) with caloric levels below normal are reduced muscle function, reduction of muscle size and density, liver and kidney failures, increase in LDL (bad) cholesterol levels, and gallstones .


Now onto the question of "Eating your exercise calories"

As I have hinted to throughout this summary of metabolic process, the body has a "range" in which it feels it is receiving the right amount of fuel. The range (as most doctors and research scientists agree) is somewhere between 500 calories above your maintenance calories and 1000 calories below your maintenance calories. This means that the metabolism won't drastically change it's functionality in this range, with that said, this is not exact, it is a range based on averages, you may have a larger or smaller range based on the 3 factors of metabolism stated at the top.
On our website (MyFitnessPal), when you enter your goals, there is a prebuilt deficit designed to keep you in the "normal" metabolic functionality while still burning more calories then you take in. This goal DOES NOT INCLUDE exercise until you enter it. If you enter exercise into your daily plan, the site automatically adjusts your total caloric needs to stay within that normal range (in other words, just put your exercise in, don't worry about doing any additional calculations). Not eating exercise calories can bring you outside that range and (if done over an extended period of days or weeks) will gradually send your body into survival mode, making it harder (but not impossible) to continue to lose weight. The important thing to understand is (and this is REALLY important) the closer you are to your overall healthy weight (again, your metabolism views this a a range, not a specific number) the more prominant the survival mode becomes (remember, we talked about efficiency). This is because as fat becomes scarce, muscle is easier to break down and transport. And thus, the reason why it's harder to lose that "Last 10 pounds".

I really hope this puts a lot of questions to bed. I know people struggle with this issue and I want to make sure they have the straight facts of why we all harp on eating your exercise calories. "

Hi Beth
i am like you , still cant get my head round the fact that i should eat more to lose weight.
ive lost 23 lbs altogether, about 1 lb a week . i had at that time re calculated my calores as MFP sugested this be a good idea as I had been on the same calories for months
I then plateaud for 2 months until i was brave enough to recalculate again and put in that i only wanted to lose half a pound a week.
I was really scared to do this as my calories were now going to be even more than the original amount.
It however has miraculously worked and I have started loosing again. still cant beleive it but am going to go with it as I realised that I couldnt maintain a healthy diet on 1250 calories, i am now eating 1380 a day
I do have to make sure I write in every single thing I eat as I find I easily forget and its amazing how this adds up
I make sure all my meals are healthy on this amount of calories and I eat calories form any exercise burned as extra treats
So if I want a bag of crisps or glass of wine at the end of the day I have to go and use my crosstrainer until I have burned the extra. I hate exercise but am keeping this up as I want the treats
I am 62, very inactive due to arthritis and a thyroid problem but I am keeping it up.
Keep reading all the motivation you can and enjoy eating in a healthy way. on bad days dont despair, just promise yourself to get back on track

Thank you love people who get to the point, keep them coming.

1stepaheda