Why Eating Exercise Calories is so important.

Great explanation and example!

I really want to try eating back my calories because I feel like I've stalled a bit...but I am terribly afraid it will backfire for me.

Anyone else?

I really want to try eating back my calories because I feel like I've stalled a bit...but I am terribly afraid it will backfire for me.

Anyone else?

Well you have two choices. Potentionally stay stalled or try something new. The body will either gain, stall or lose. Nothing to lose bar a week or two, which you'll soon forget!

Thank you, thank you, thank you! I started off great with MFP (lost 7 pounds in 2 weeks) then got stuck. I think I will try to get as close to my calorie goal as I can (without going over) and see if that helps.

I usually eat most of the exercise calories back but still have some left over. Therefore I build a stockpile of reserve for the weekend in case I want to hang loose and booze or eat out at a restaurant and leave my halo at home. I gain a little come Monday, but after exercising Monday and Tuesday, with my weigh-in on Wednesday, I almost always lose.

I "stock-pile" a little through the week so I can have more wiggle room on the weekends, where I still try to eat healthy and reasonable, but I can have that 2nd beer with no regrets.

Huzzah.

I really want to try eating back my calories because I feel like I've stalled a bit...but I am terribly afraid it will backfire for me.

Anyone else?

Well you have two choices. Potentionally stay stalled or try something new. The body will either gain, stall or lose. Nothing to lose bar a week or two, which you'll soon forget!

And don't forget, you have to give your body about three or four weeks to adjust. You may initially gain a little the first two weeks, but when your body figures it out, a lot of my friends can attest, you will get over that plateau you've been stuck at in the next two weeks.

If the body's default is to burn muscle rather than fat then it wouldn't store fat to start with. It would store muscle.

Nobody is going to burn off their muscle until they are in the advanced stages of starvation.

Touche

Meet Jane. She weighs 200lbs, and wants to lose 50lbs.
Jane has a metabolism of 1500. She leads a sedentary lifestyle, so she burns about 2000 calories per day.
Jane wants to lose 1lbs/week

MFP calculates Jane's calorie intake and deducts 500 calories. She will require 1500 calories to lose 1lbs/week.

But Jane decides she will start running.
Jane burns 400 calories when she runs for 30 minutes.

Because of the extra activity, 400/1500 of the calories consumed have been burnt by Jane. That means the body must function on only 1100 calories per day to allow natural processes like hair/nail growth, skin replenishment, organ function to continue.

THUS, Jane's metabolism drops* to meet her NET calories (1100).

the last statement is a wild leap into imagination. Stick Jane in a lab and see what her metabolic rate is and I'll lay odds it's the same as it was before the exercise.

Wouldn't it be a magical coincidence if her metabolic rate fell to equal (food intake - exercise) as is proposed here ? It just doesn't happen, does it. Starving Africans or concentration camp victims are painful evidence of this, their metabolism keeps going and consumes their body fat reserves and ultimately muscle too.

There will be some slow down of metabolic rate with declining weight and muscle, for sure, but the above hypothesis that metabolic rate matches food intake minus exercise is a completely unproven and novel one.

Taken a step further, it means that a sedentary individual's metabolic rate matches their food intake. Now that would be an instant cure for obesity. Doesn't happen though, does it.

Jane's 50lb target weight loss would be 204,300 calories if it were all fat. That's going to take some using up. It's enough to keep her alive for 100 days without eating ! That's where the energy to sustain the metabolic processes is going to come from.

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replying to subscribe, so that I can read this in my spare time. Thanks for the post :-)

How does this work? /|\

This is so true and it works! When I first started MFP I rarely ate back my exercise calories, but then I hit a major plateau that lasted about a month. I decided to switch things up and start eating back ALL my exercise calories and the weight finally started coming off again! I was finally able to reach a huge goal of getting under 200 pounds and it seems like every week the scale keeps on moving in the right direction. I encourage anyone who is struggling or going through a plateau to do this because it really works. Thanks for posting! :flowerforyou:

Bump! Thanks I totalllly needed this!

Bump to read later!

Bump:

This is true, recently I have been losing weight without losing inches!
But since I have been eating my exercise calories I have dropped in both areas.