daily and weekly calories

something i have always been confused by....if you go over one day on your daily net calories but at the weekly net calories you are still under is that ok????

It's more about consistency, but yes if you mess up a day and ensure you are in check for the week you will still lose weight

If you go over by a relatively small amount and then over the course of the week reduce by small amounts to make up for it you will be ok. If you have a REALLY bad day which happens to us all, it might not be a good thing to try to make them all up at once. I put it behind me and look forward.

its a weekly goal

To those of you that are working out, and have lost a lot of weight, do you eat the extra calories that the MFP gives you for working out? Or do you just try to stay under what your original calorie goal was. There are a few of us that are concerned that if we eat the extra calories that we "earned" for working out that we wont lose the weight. Help!!

It depends how you setup your goal. To lose weight you need to be in a healthy caloric deficit. There are 2 ways to accomplish that:

Set your daily caloric intake at a deficit
This is what most people do, and is how MFP is designed to work. You figure out your daily caloric need (TDEE, or total daily energy expenditure), then set your calorie goal lower than that. For example.. if your TDEE is 1800, you might set your daily calorie goal to 1400. That puts you in a caloric deficit and you will start to lose weight*. When you exercise you burn additional calories. These burned calories are not accounted for in your TDEE or the calorie goal you set based on your TDEE. So exercising increases that caloric deficit. The thing to watch here is how big that deficit gets. Every body responds differently, but the larger the deficit the worse it is for your body (the assumption is that the larger the deficit gets the harder it is to properly fuel your body). And this is why people recommend eating back exercise calories.

Use exercise to create the deficit
With this method you set your daily caloric intake to equal your TDEE. Then you exercise and burn calories. Those burned calories are not accounted for when you set your daily goal equal to your TDEE, and thus you end up in a deficit. The size of that deficit is dependent on your workouts. You burn 75cals walking the dog and your deficit is 75 cals. You burn 500 cals running and the deficit is 500.



*This is VERY simiplified and makes A LOT of assumptions, but is good enough for this conversation.