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So... what I've been doing this semester is 1200 calories on days I don't work out and 1300 calories on days I do. I work out 2 days a week. On monday and wednesday I have a not-too-tough martial arts class in the morning for 90 minutes and cardio kickboxing in the early evening.

So today I went hiking in the early morning and wanted to start recording calories burned. I looked up exercise to calories burned tables for my weight. With my weight and the time, the activities stated absurdly high numbers for calories burned. So I chopped those numbers in half to be extra conservative. That still came out to 1200 calories burned...

What on earth am I supposed to do? Do I have to eat more than 1300 today? I'm so confused. What do you do about eating back exercise calories?

You will never know what you burned for calories - like ever, so, eat for a set amount and if you are still really hungry, eat a bit more. You might just be able to have a higher deficit that day and then back to normal other days.

Exercise affects people differently. Exercising makes me less hungry, so I never eat calories back. Some people get ravenous from exercise, try to temper that... and just try to stick to it without ever allowing yourself to get so hungry that you feel you need to stuff your face. That's what I do anyway.

I have the exactly the opposite affect when I exercising and that is I get hungry after yoga. I would suggest just don't worry about how many you burn but stick to knowing your intake.

I agree with this. I never try to account for calories burned. I workout, and eat the way I was eating while losing weight before I started working out.

If your count is extremely accurate, your calories in I mean, aside from that listen to your body. If you are totally staving eat a little more, if not you're fine. If you feel fine, you're fine. Try not to get too caught up in the numbers.

I don't ever try to calculate calories burned from exercise. And even though I work out pretty hard-core, I know the estimates are never gonna be right. I just eat more on days I work out, and up my protein, cuz I lift hard. So eat more if you're hungry, and don't if you're not. And pat yourself on the back for exercising, because it's awesome!

This is something I was pondering this morning. I was putting my food for the day into MFP and had a training session this morning so I stuck that in too. And the dang program tells me I will have a net intake of 800 calories for the day.

So that makes me do a brief little internal freak-out, and I think I should eat another 400 cals today to hit 1200! Because AHH, I can't survive on 800 calories! But then I remember... I'm eating 1500 cal worth of food today. I am skeptical of MFP when it tells me I burned over 600 cals in an hour. I don't want to eat 400 calories if I'm not hungry for them.

So logic prevailed.

Don't let the numbers get the best of you. You know your body way better than some computer program does. Eat if your increased activity makes you hungry; don't if you're fine.

If you hiked for a few hours, you probably did burn that many calories. I usually feel hungrier for a couple of days after a hike like that, and will up my calories by a few hundred.