Food and Exercise Log

I think my food & exercise diary is on crack. How one can gain bonus calories makes no sense.

Well, my wife and I say that sex gives us bonus calories.  

But, I use DietPower and it does put exercise calories into the equation so for normal diets if your MBR was 1800 and your target would require you to only eat 1600, but you burned 800, your grand total for the day would be...

Naught plus naught =naught, carry the decimal...2400.  Might that be what you are referring too?

 LOL

I think so. I use My Fitness Pal, and I really like it because I don't have to think. I just have to get hard and fast in the practice of logging everything, which I have been trying to do. I'm either under my calories or over. And I always forget to log my exercise, so i plopped that in there tonight and got all confuddled.

 That's why I didn't log my exercise in My Fitness Pal when I was losing.

For myfitnesspal----I got advise from one of the members.

It always will add in the bonus calories---you can't stop it, I was told. However, you can go in and make the calorie burned value of your exercise = 1 (0 doesn't work). That way it will only bump your goals up by 1.

Hope that works for you.

I log my food there but the only portion I use is the daily nutrient breakdown to track calories/carbs/protein. I don't pay attention to the 2150 it tells me to eat. It took me 3 months to realize it bumps up my required (or allowed) protein numbers when I exercise.

The program works by giving you the target number based on an ideal, average # of cals to get to a certain deficit. Because it doesn't want you to lose more than 2 lbs a weeks, it bumps up your calories to maintain the same deficit. Just ignore it.

Diet Power does the same in many ways.  DP will calculate MBR, factor in any weight goals determine what "normal" calories you need to eat to meet goal.  It then adds exercise calories into your daily budget so you can eat more...I DON'T LET IT MAKE ME DO THAT.

I lock DP into 800 calories a day.  I log my exercise and ignore the bonus factor.  So, for the time being DP is good for tracking all nutrients including macro.  It has a wealth of information on nutritional values, recommended amounts and such.  It even grades me on getting enough of this or too much of that.  You can even change values and % of nutrients to suit your need.  There is a caveat to that.  When it grades you it bases its grade on your budget plus average calories burned in exercise.  

As long as you understand ANY tracker limitations, they can be valuable tools.  This was particularly true in my qualification phase.  I printed out my records, the summary reports and such for every WLM meeting I had.  

BTW...for those wrapped up in the debate on counting calories associated with fiber...Most data bases I have seen SUBTRACT calories from fiber when giving you a total calorie for that food item.  As an example toasted almonds have 14.4 g fat, 6.5 g carbs, 5.8 g protein, 3.2 g fiber.  Add up the calories from fat, carbs and protein and you get 179 calories. The data bases show 167 calories with is the 3.2 g of fiber removed.  However, food that you enter,  you can generally tell the program to ignore that fact and use the calories you tell it to use.. 

i use livestrong/daily plate.... pretty easy to use and it has an app as well.  i used to log it religiously, now i do it every once in a while to make sure i'm staying on track.