im gonna ignore that from now on, sometimes listening to the body is best, i mean i shoot for 1600 cals, but today ive only eaten 1224? im not hungry and ive eaten all day so what do ya do?

im not force feeding myself.

I too don't understand the "eat back" mentality. If you're hungry, feed your body. If you're not, why consume needless calories. To me, its all about listening to your body. There are days when I exercise and I'm famished an hour or so afterwards. Then, there are days when I can do the same workout and not be nearly as hungry.

I'll stick to tracking what I eat, staying within my goal and go from there.

Aha. I've never used TDP so I didn't know that's what they suggest. I agree that eating back *all* those calories is not a good idea especially since calculating calories burned is fairly impossible to do accurately.

I'm also with TheBeautyWithin - there's a happy medium between figuring the math and listening to your body. I can't grab a snack any old time I'm peckish and expect to lose weight, but I know when I've exerted myself and really need to stoke my metabolic fire even if it means going over my daily calories.

Egg-zacktly!

And the site is set up to encourage people to overcount their exercise calories by including things like "typing" and "driving" on their list of activities. So people are sort of subtly being encouraged to count things to really shouldn't count towards calorie burning but that are just part of their base calorie needs.

It's really the only thing I don't like about the site ... I wish they'd just keep the caloried burned limited to real exercise and not subtract them from your daily intake. It makes it far too confusing otherwise.

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Can someone please tell me what TDP stands for? I am coming up with three different explanations but none of them is related to weight or eating.

TDP= The Daily Plate

Their calculator tells me I can eat 2480 calories given the exercise I do I've been maintaining almost 7 years now and have a good handle on what I need to eat. Anything over a 1600 calorie/day average and I gain.

Mel

Yeah I don't use their calculators at all. They also told me that at 170 lbs, I needed to eat 1016 calories per day to lose 2lbs a week. *eyeroll*

I tend to use the Mayo clinic calculator and then finesse it from there.

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I do eat some of mine back - the site I am using at the moment calculated I should eat 1260 calories a day to lose weight. This is doing NO exercise.

However I do anywhere up to 90 minutes hard cardio most days a week. Spin class, long runs, treadmill, weights classes etc and so yes, I do "eat back" calories burned.

I probably average out to around 1500-1600 actual intake.

The point I think these sites are making with eating back calories is that the initial calorie amount they give you is when you do no exercise. Mine is at least - it's calculated so that I would have a 500 calorie a day deficit from my "maintenance" level and thats basically just sitting on my bum all day with minimal movement.

They recommend you eat some back if you're exercising because they've already given you a 500 cal deficit through diet alone.

I'm like one of the other girls above - I know that if I didn't eat some of that back then I would be to weak to do the amount of cardio I do. There is nothing worse than that feeling!