Today was Ride to Work Day. So I rode my bike to work, even though I wasn't working! Up and down hills, a total of 40km (yep, I rode home as well. But that took a bit longer).

My HRM says I used 1899 calories. Over a 4 hour bike ride. I figure that's a bit of an under-estimation, because when I rested I turned it off and there were quite a few times on the way home when I forgot to turn it back on again!

Now, the program I'm doing is calorie counting with exercise (novel, huh?) I have a Polar HRM WM42, which uses my weight updates to calculate my calorie range and exercise calories each week. This week I'm supposed to eat 1800 per day and exercise for a total of 2100 for the week.

I did that in one day! And I've already eaten my 1800 today (healthy stuff, but I was starving). For a breakdown of what I've had see the link in my signature.

My question is, is there an adviseable amount of extra calories you should have on a heavy workout day? Like 25% or 50% of what you expended, or something like that? Or should I just stick to healthy options, and eat when I'm hungry? I'm not at the moment, but I just had my killer smoothie for lunch (see link for recipe under "lunch" - it was amazing!)

Cheers chickies!

This is my view -- for ordinary daily workouts, I don't try to add back in any calories, that's just part of my regular routine. But I'm in marathon training season and doing weekly long runs of anywhere from 10 to 15 miles. I find that I HAVE to fuel a little more, or bonk out.

I do eat a little more healthy carbs the day before to fuel up for the big run, then by the time I've eaten a small snack before the run, fuel a little during the run, and eat breakfast after ... that's already accounted for most of the extra calories that I burned. So, yes, I do give myself license to eat a little more because of the extra calorie expenditure, but it's more designed around sustaining athletic performance. I find if I don't eat a little extra, I get super-hungry either later in the day or the next day ... and risk a binge. But, that's me!

The other exception is when I'm on hiking vacations ... I definitely need to eat more to sustain 10-15 mile day hikes!! The trick is finding the balance between eating enough to keep my energy up, but not go way overboard.

I guess you have to go by how you feel ... if you don't feel weak or unusually hungry, your bonus burn should translate to extra weight loss!!

I am strong believer in listening to your body on these type of issues.

Food is fuel and it is important to fuel your exercise. If this was going to be an ongoing then yes you would want to increase your calories to make sure you had the energy to keep this up. But this activity is now in the past. So if you feel good and feel satisfied then don't worry about eating back all of the calories.

It's important to have enough fuel to sustain your workout... If it's just a one time hard workout I try not to adjust my calories too much but I do make an effort to add in more protein.

I see a few things in your food diary that are probably jacking your calories consumed up and making you hungry..

You'll do better if you eat less sugar/refined carbs and more lean protein . I'd replace some of the fruit with veggies, too.