Reader Request

I got this question from K.

"Can you blog one day on your opinion of eating your exercise calories back? part of me feels like its counterproductive, but then mathematically it makes sense, so im kind of at a stand still. ie: my calorie suggestions say 1350 or so, so i generally stick in that range, but if I go to the gym i typically burn 700-800 calories on my Polar HRM. So at the end of the day, I've only net 550-700 calories for the day - which is way under the minimum to run your body.... which may be why some of us are seeing a stand still on the scale? I just dont know if that really makes sense or not, or if its really the right thing to do."

I'm so glad she asked this because it coincided with an article I read last week.  This article at Shape Magazine gave a formula to use to calculate a rough estimate of how many calories you should be eating to lose weight.

BMR = 655 + (4.35 x weight in pounds) + (4.7 x height in inches) - (4.7 x age in years)

Take that number and use the following formula to determine your activity level to multiply the BMR by.  (Be honest!)

Sedentary- 1.4  (Not moving much at all throughout the day, reading, watching TV, etc)
Light Active- 1.5  (This is most people: You likely work at an office but get in an hour of moderate exercise per day)
Moderately Active- 1.6  (Your job involved light manual labor and you're active outside of work)
Very Active- 1.9 (You're a machine.  Probably military or your job is very physically demanding and super active outside of work as well)

So let's take moi for example.  My numbers would be 1908+329-174 for a total of 2063 then my activity level is lightly active even though I bust ass during my workout time so 2063 x 1.5=3095.

3095 is the amount of calories it would take to maintain my weight according to that article.

Then it asks to determine the type of exercise you're doing (ie- our HIIT workouts and strength training burns more calories once we stop than if you did say a dance type workout), the type of diet you eat, how much weight you have to lose and your individual metabolism.



If you're doing strength training, harder workouts like interval cardio training (Supreme 90 Day, Power 90, TurboFire, etc) (Affiliate links) then the guy recommends only cutting about 250 calories at first instead of the traditional 500-1000 calories because aggressively cutting calories may not be successful in the long term.  He also suggests that you should increase activity before cutting calories.  Now technically, I'm cutting 1000 calories from what the maintenance calories are and I'm not seeing much movement on the scale.  The more I cut my calories, the less I'm losing and I bust my hump when I workout, I think you guys see that in my workout numbers when I'm not sick.

So according to him, I should be at 2845 calories given the type of workouts I usually do when I'm not hacking my lungs out.  Now I'm personally not comfortable with a number that high but I'm willing to try something closer to 2300 calories.  Ugh, I still can't fathom that number but he urges you to try it for 2 weeks to see what happens.  When I'm back to 100% and can bust my tail like usual, I may put this into practice and see what shakes out.  I know this is a lot of numbers being thrown at you but go to the article and see if all of it in one spot makes more sense than my babble.

So K, I hope that helps shed some light on numbers game.  Remember it's only an estimate and a 2 week trial couldn't hurt.  As always, check with your doctor before trying a new program.

Did you do the math?  What do you think of the suggested calories for your number?  Is it much higher than you thought it should be or about right?

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