Quote:
Originally Posted by lovemydoggiesx2
I have never heard of eating back your calories. To lose weight you need more calories out than in, so to me it doesnt even make sense. I try to eat 1200-1300 a day with 1 hour exercise and I lose about a pound a week.
I agree with berryblondeboys. At your weight I think you should be eating more like 1600 a day. You donīt want to starve yourself!
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Your suggestion (to eat more to lose weight in a healthier manner in the long run) is exactly what "eating back" calories is all about. The theory being that if you are very active, exercise a lot, then you need to eat more (even to lose weight) than someone who is far less active.
"Eating back" is just a way to (theoretically) keep the net calorie deficit consistent (a zero deficit if you're wanting to maintain your weight or a specific deficit of say 500 calories per day to lose one pound per week).
So if you are losing weight on 1500 calories per day and start adding in exercise that burns 500 extra calories, you can "eat back" some or all of those 500 calories and continue to lose weight.
There's no real consensus on how much of a deficit is "too much of a deficit" and even whether there's any such thing. (Personally, I believe there is. There's a point at which eating too little becomes unproductive).
To some degree we all are "eating back" calories, because otherwise, we would all just stop eating entirely until we lose all of our excess weight. But most of us find that eating too few calories doesn't work very well, at the very least because of hunger, and often because of other issues like fatigue, and many unfortunate risks associated with too-low calorie intake (such as hair loss, diminished resistance to infection, gallstones and other gallbladder problems, even cardiac damage).
In terms of calorie intake, how low is too low (and whether there even is a too low) depends upon many factors including your activity level. If you're extremely sedentary, you can safely and comfortably eat less than if you're extremely active (in a nutshell that's what "eating back" calories is about - making sure that while exercising and being active, that you not try to reduce your calorie level too far).
"Eating back" exercise calories (but still maintaining a calorie deficit sufficient to lose weight) is one technique people use to insure that they don't "starve themselves." (Although starvation is a poor term to use, since we're not really literally talking about starvation here, but rather optimizing weight loss without adding other risks such as cravings, hunger, hair loss, gallstones and all the other potentially nasty risks of extreme calorie restriction).
The problem with eating back calories, is that you never know if you're really burning as many calories as you think you are. The online calculators are notoriously unreliable, they reflect averages but they may not reflect your metabolism, so only by experimenting can you determine how much you can eat while exercising.
I think that it makes more sense to generically experiment with different calorie levels than to try to determine exactly how many calories you're burning with exercise and then try to eat some or all of those back while still maintaining a deficit.
A lot of people try (and some even enjoy the process of) determining and calculating the exact "math" of their weight loss. I've tried to do so in the past, but I never found it productive. Instead, I'd drive myself bonkers trying to make my weight loss match the math.
A more "by ear" experimentation approach works better for me.
Calories consumed vs. Net calories
