Your Ideal Form

Helping you on your journey to your best self!

tdee

Eating Back Exercise Calories

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Should You Eat Back Calories Burned Off from Exercise-

A question I see get asked a lot is whether or not one should “eat back” the calories burned during exercise. You’ve calculated your TDEE, and you’re eating at a deficit to lose weight*, but that exercise raises your TDEE some, so you’re now at a greater deficit. Should you eat those calories back?

This is a bit tough for me because to be perfectly honest, I just don’t get it. After doing all that work, why would you negate it all by eating it all back? There’s also a big potential pitfall with eating back your calories: overestimating how many calories you’ve burned and thus eating back more than what you just worked off. Studies show** that people regularly overestimate how many calories we burn during exercise. And it’s not our fault; cardio machines grossly overestimate how many calories you burn, and even fitness apps can just do a best guess based on national averages. So the treadmill/app tells you that you’ve burned 300 calories when it’s really 200, and you think that means you’ve earned that 250 calorie snickers bar. But in reality, you’ve undone all your hard work, and you’re now over your budget.

Studies also show we tend to be bad at estimating how many calories we eat***. In this case, we tend to underestimate the number of calories in the food we have. With more and more places putting calorie counts on menus, this is getting harder to do, but if this isn’t commonplace where you live yet, it can be easy to convince yourself that your post-workout smoothie is healthy, and therefore much lower in calories than it really is. Combined with the elliptical machine telling you that you burned more than you actually did, and it becomes really easy to eat more than your TDEE for the day.

So, what do you do if exercise leaves you woozy and you have to have something after your workout? Here are a couple of tips:

  • Aim for eating back half the calories you burned at most.
  • If working out is always leaving you feeling ravenous, try switching to lower-intensity exercise.
  • A controversial opinion is to stop exercising all together and just focus on your diet.
  • Try to think of any calories burned during exercise as merely a bonus or a turbo boost to get you to your destination faster!

 

*If you’re trying to gain muscle, you definitely want to eat back those calories, getting as much of them from protein as possible!
** http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26469988
*** http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1454084

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4 Reasons to Be Patient with a Plateau

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Getting Through a Weight Loss Plateau

On your journey to reach your ideal form, there may come a time when the scale just does not seem to be moving. These are plateaus, and they feel like you’re driving across Interstate 10 in Texas. You’ve been driving for 8 hours, and you’re still not out of the state. It can be tempting to just throw in the towel when it seems like you’re spinning your wheels and going nowhere fast, but if you can hang in there, I promise it will be worth it.

We’re going to define a plateau as being at the same weight for three or more weeks. One or two weeks might just be a fluke. Three, and we’re definitely in a plateau.

Here are four reasons to be patient when dealing with a plateau:

  1. A big woosh could be right around the corner at the next weigh in. Weight loss is rarely linear, and often times when the scale seems stuck, when it does start moving again, it does so in a big way.
  2. If it’s only been a week or two, there are a number of things that could be messing with the numbers on the scale: your monthly cycle, a very intense workout session, or eating big meal up to a day before you step on the scale can all increase water retention. Water is heavy, and can easily throw your weight off, so try to weigh yourself first thing in the morning, before any workouts or meals.
  3. Keep in mind that a plateau is being at the same weight for a number of weeks. Often times, when someone starts a new program, there’s a large drop in weight due to water weight loss. But that’s not sustainable. If you’re losing a half to one pound per week, you’re doing great!
  4. It’s a slow process, don’t make it slower by giving up now. Learn to enjoy the process rather than fixating on results and you’ll actually get better results.

If you’ve been at a plateau for more than six weeks, then it’s time to re-evaluate your process. If you’ve lost a significant amount of weight, you may need to recalculate your TDEE.

If you’re stuck in a plateau, now is a good time to go back and look at pictures you took at the beginning of your journey. Inspire yourself by how far you’ve come.

Why Simply “Eating Less” Won’t Help You Lose Weight

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Eating _Less_

A big portion of weight loss advice gets boiled down to: “Eat less, move more.” Let’s tackle that first part: just eat “less”. That’s not very specific though, is it? How much less are you supposed to eat? And less than WHAT exactly? Less than before? Less than a breadbasket?

People generally go wrong with eating “less” in one of two ways. In one camp, we have those who cut way, way, WAY back, and start eating very little. Inevitably this leads to them being hungry all the time, and eventually they give in to their hunger and eat the entire kitchen. Then they feel awful about it, and give up, thinking they’ll never be able to lose weight.

On the flip side are those who know they should take things gradually, so they cut back a little based on their previous eating habits. Often, however, they aren’t relying on hard data. It could well be that previously, their eating regimen had them gaining weight at a slow creep of five pounds a year. Now they’ve cut back a tiny bit, so they’re only gaining at two pounds a year. While this is a step in the right direction, when they step on the scale and don’t see a change, they get frustrated, decide that eating less is of no use since the numbers aren’t going down anyway, and give up, thinking they’ll never be able to lose weight.

While eating “less” is generally accepted as true, one important piece that is missing is just how much less to eat. Eating the right amount will keep you on a steady pace to reach your goals. It is also important to eat enough, so you aren’t left “starving” and frustrated and wanting to quit.

So, exactly how much “less” should you eat so that you hit the sweet spot of not eating like a bird while still seeing results? For that, we’ll need to do some math. We need to determine, based on your current height and weight, how many calories your body burns just keeping you alive. Pumping blood, digesting food, breathing… all that stuff our brain handles for us without us having to think about it. Then we’ll multiply that by a factor of how active you are. That is how many calories total your body burns each day or your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE). I won’t make you actually do all the math; you can use any number of online TDEE calculators to come up with your number. Take in fewer calories, and your body makes up the difference by burning some excess fat. Take in more, and your body stores the extra as fat. The generally accepted equation is that one pound of fat is around 3500 calories. So to lose one pound a week, we can divide that by seven, and you come up with needing to eat 500 calories below your TDEE each day to hit that one pound a week goal. If you are currently eating well above your TDEE, cut back slowly. Don’t make the mistake in the example above of cutting back too quickly without getting used to it!

Keep in mind that despite all the SCIENCE! and MATH! that goes into this, your TDEE calculation is still an estimate. If you are not seeing results after a few weeks, and you are certain you are tracking your intake correctly, you may need to adjust how many calories you are taking in.

Have you tried eating some arbitrary amount of “less” before? How did it work out for you? Let me know in the comments!