GetSetGo
Full Member
It's my personal experience and opinion but thought I would post my view on the subject as I have read quite a few posts on this.
In 2008 I lost 47lbs in weight by calorie counting. I took up running and eventually was running 50+ miles a week, absolutely loved it.
You can imagine I burnt off a lot of calories!! A ten mile run on a Sunday afternoon could quite easily burn off 1000 calories! Did I eat them? You bet I did and enjoyed every single one of them.
When I first started to lose weight my calorie allowance for 2lbs a week loss was a lot higher than 1200kcal but as we all know the more you lose the less calories you get, but the minimum of calories we should eat a day is 1200! I always ate all those extra calories or at least half of them making sure I never dropped below that magic number. Occasionally I would bank the ones I didn't eat and use them up if I was going out for a meal or something.
Why? How can this be possible? But won't I put weight on?
Exercise........The normal things you do everyday like walking the kids to school, cleaning etc are usually already included in your daily calorie allowance so aren't normally included in your daily "exercise" calories unless your daily calorie amount is set at your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) which is the calories your body uses just to function, if you were laying in bed all day doing nothing.
MFP and most calorie calculators you find online asks you for your activity level when you set it up so the daily calorie allowance it gives you already includes calories burnt doing normal everyday things, exercise is usually added separately.
You should look at it this way, imagine your body is a car! The calories you eat is the fuel you put in that car! Exercise is extra miles!
The lowest amount of calories (fuel) a day you should be consuming is 1200!!
So you put 1200 miles of fuel in your car and go on a journey that works out at 1200 miles exactly. But on the way you decide you want to stop off and visit a few different places. The only problem is those extra places you want to visit means you are going to use more fuel!
But you only have 1200 miles in your tank?? So what do you need to do?? You got it!!
Put more fuel in the tank to make sure you can complete your journey and visit those extra places!!
You wouldn't expect your car to do extra miles without fuelling up with extra fuel and your body is no different, eat your extra calories! exercise means your building muscle, getting leaner so enjoy them...........after all you earned them!!
You should aim to eat all of them if you are on the lowest calorie intake of 1200kcal a day, if you are eating for example 1500kcal a day then you can afford not to eat all of them (depending on how many calories you burn off) but should eat at least half of them, just make sure your total food intake AFTER exercise doesn't drop below 1200kcal a day minimum!!
It worked for me and thousands of people like me and it can work for you, try it, give yourself a month and see what happens.
Just make sure your exercise calories are being calculated correctly!! Do not trust the figure that the machines you use at the gym or at home give you, they are normally way off, even some of the calorie counting websites can give you a lot higher numbers.
Get yourself a heart rate monitor, although not 100% accurate they do give you a more accurate kcal burned figure than machines or websites. Most of the heart rate monitors need to have what they call background calories taken off the figure it gives you, background calories are the normal calories you burn during the period you exercised that you would have burnt off whether you exercised or not.
If you have calculated a daily calorie allowance and are sticking to it to lose weight the background calories are already included in this figure. These can be calculated easily by dividing a 24 hour period by your total calorie allowance for the day and finding out how many calories you use per minute, if you exercise for 30 minutes multiply that figure by 30 and deduct from the figure your heart rate monitor gives you. This will give you the amount of kcal you actually burnt during exercise.
If you want to get really serious you can use something like a Ki Fit which you wear all day and are pretty accurate, this tells you what you burn in a 24 hour period. You can pinpoint from the software exactly how many calories you burnt for a set period like when you exercised, again you would need to deduct the background calories.
As I said these are my views, don't want to get into a big debate about the subject just hope it helps someone to achieve their goals!
In 2008 I lost 47lbs in weight by calorie counting. I took up running and eventually was running 50+ miles a week, absolutely loved it.
You can imagine I burnt off a lot of calories!! A ten mile run on a Sunday afternoon could quite easily burn off 1000 calories! Did I eat them? You bet I did and enjoyed every single one of them.
When I first started to lose weight my calorie allowance for 2lbs a week loss was a lot higher than 1200kcal but as we all know the more you lose the less calories you get, but the minimum of calories we should eat a day is 1200! I always ate all those extra calories or at least half of them making sure I never dropped below that magic number. Occasionally I would bank the ones I didn't eat and use them up if I was going out for a meal or something.
Why? How can this be possible? But won't I put weight on?
Exercise........The normal things you do everyday like walking the kids to school, cleaning etc are usually already included in your daily calorie allowance so aren't normally included in your daily "exercise" calories unless your daily calorie amount is set at your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) which is the calories your body uses just to function, if you were laying in bed all day doing nothing.
MFP and most calorie calculators you find online asks you for your activity level when you set it up so the daily calorie allowance it gives you already includes calories burnt doing normal everyday things, exercise is usually added separately.
You should look at it this way, imagine your body is a car! The calories you eat is the fuel you put in that car! Exercise is extra miles!
The lowest amount of calories (fuel) a day you should be consuming is 1200!!
So you put 1200 miles of fuel in your car and go on a journey that works out at 1200 miles exactly. But on the way you decide you want to stop off and visit a few different places. The only problem is those extra places you want to visit means you are going to use more fuel!
But you only have 1200 miles in your tank?? So what do you need to do?? You got it!!
Put more fuel in the tank to make sure you can complete your journey and visit those extra places!!
You wouldn't expect your car to do extra miles without fuelling up with extra fuel and your body is no different, eat your extra calories! exercise means your building muscle, getting leaner so enjoy them...........after all you earned them!!
You should aim to eat all of them if you are on the lowest calorie intake of 1200kcal a day, if you are eating for example 1500kcal a day then you can afford not to eat all of them (depending on how many calories you burn off) but should eat at least half of them, just make sure your total food intake AFTER exercise doesn't drop below 1200kcal a day minimum!!
It worked for me and thousands of people like me and it can work for you, try it, give yourself a month and see what happens.
Just make sure your exercise calories are being calculated correctly!! Do not trust the figure that the machines you use at the gym or at home give you, they are normally way off, even some of the calorie counting websites can give you a lot higher numbers.
Get yourself a heart rate monitor, although not 100% accurate they do give you a more accurate kcal burned figure than machines or websites. Most of the heart rate monitors need to have what they call background calories taken off the figure it gives you, background calories are the normal calories you burn during the period you exercised that you would have burnt off whether you exercised or not.
If you have calculated a daily calorie allowance and are sticking to it to lose weight the background calories are already included in this figure. These can be calculated easily by dividing a 24 hour period by your total calorie allowance for the day and finding out how many calories you use per minute, if you exercise for 30 minutes multiply that figure by 30 and deduct from the figure your heart rate monitor gives you. This will give you the amount of kcal you actually burnt during exercise.
If you want to get really serious you can use something like a Ki Fit which you wear all day and are pretty accurate, this tells you what you burn in a 24 hour period. You can pinpoint from the software exactly how many calories you burnt for a set period like when you exercised, again you would need to deduct the background calories.
As I said these are my views, don't want to get into a big debate about the subject just hope it helps someone to achieve their goals!
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envious of you being able to run lol I really miss it, my running days are well and truly over though.
