Exercise Diary-Frustrated!

Hello! This is my second day with fatsecret and I am having trouble with the exercise diary. Does it take the calories I burn and subtract them from my daily cal intake? I'm trying to add the running I did this morning and it keeps messing it up. Thanks

Hi Cathy,

No, I don't believe that your exercise calories burned are subtracted from your caloric intake.

The basic premise of the exercise diary is that your body needs energy to just function - so you can set, for instance, how many hours you sleep, rest, etc. Then what you do is add the length of time you did any exercise (and possibly the intensity - see the walking section - it has walking at 2, 3.5 and 4mph if I remember correctly) and you reduce that from your "sitting" rate.

Sorry - this is hard to explain - you just have to keep poking around with it. It's been a while since I set up mine - but for weekdays, I put down the half hour I'm in the car to/from work, the 7.5 hours I'm doing what they term as "desk work", 8 hours of sleep and then to make up the rest of a 24-hour day, added resting and sitting time.

Then whenever I do any aerobic exercise, I generally choose the type and how long I did it and then indicate that it should be "instead" of the time I have set for, say, "resting". The time for the actual exercise is then reduced from the resting time with the amount of calories burned - based on what the site knows my weight is.

Your weight makes a difference because it takes more energy for a 300 lb person to do something for 15 minutes, as opposed to a 150 lb person doing the same activity for the same amount of time. Of course, this means, as we lose weight, we will either have to up the intensity and/or the length of time to generate the same amount of calories burned as we did when we were heavier. Hope this helps! Joyce

**Edit 2/13: I paid a little closer attention to the diet calendar this morning - FS will subtract our exercise calories from the calories we've eaten to give the "net" calories for that day - I stand corrected. :- ) J

When you add something to your exercise diary, it just calculates how many calories are burned from that exercise, and tallies it. it totals all the exercise/resting/sleeping calories burned and shows you that total on your diet calendar under "exercise(kcal)". this is how many calories your burned for the day TOTAL(being alive/sleeping/exercise)

if you go to your diet calendar, there is another column called "Net(kcal)" which is your daily calorie intake minus calories burned.

So there 3 columns are:

Food(kcal) = calorie intake
Exercise(kcal) = calories burned
Net(kcal) = Food(kcal) - Exercise(kcal)

when adding to your exercise diary, no math on your part is required, just add the exercise you did and for how long and the website does the rest. As soon as you start, you are going to have like 1200-2000 calories burned from sleeping and resting.

hope that helps?

It tracks the calories you eat and the calories you burn with various activities. One will not add or subtract from the other. At the end of the day, it just takes the difference between the calories you ate and the calories you burned and comes up with your net calories for the day. If you eat 1800 calories and burn 3000 calories, your net calorie intake for the day is -1200. Hope this helps.

Is there a net calorie intake figure we should be aiming for then - sorry I am new and a litte confused too.

Sorry just to be clear I meant - when we have included our calorie intake and our exercise calories have been deducted - is there a net figure we should be aiming for>

I know i need to eat 1600 cals a day - but should I be aiming for a net figure too?

In general, having a net calorie amount of 500 calories a day will translate into about a 1 pound a week loss (500 X 7 days = 3500 calories = 1 pound). A net calorie amount of 1000 calories a day will translate into roughly 2 pounds a week weight loss. Fatsecret seems to give pretty high estimates for calorie burn though so you should take the net calorie amount with a bit of a grain of salt. It really is just an estimate.

Thanks very much for the explanation. I have never looked at it that way before - but does sound interesting and sensible.

I think I wlll monitor my net effect against loss for a few weeks to see if I can spot a pattern.

agree with all of this.