The Exercise Diary Really Confuses Me

this is day 5 for me and I've done 3 x 40 min cardio combat workouts but I find it really difficult imputting this on the exercise diary because I have to substitute it with either sleeping or resting or desk work. I've only added my exercise once 'cause I can't be bothered with all the increasing and decreasing of other activities that has to be done and I'm sure the one that I've entered is completely wrong. Is there anyway just to add the 'extra exercise' that I do rather than the normal day to day exercise of sleeping, resting etc?

Any help would be appreciated. I'm still trying to get to grips with most things on this site except the food diary which I think is absolutely fantastic and really has helped me to see just how many calories is in all the foods that I like

It's going to automatically default to substituting extra exercise for 'Resting,' and that's what you want it to do. The bottom line of the exercise calendar is that there can only be 24 hours in your day. So if your default is 8 hours sleeping, 16 hours resting, and then you put in 40 minutes of cardio, they have to get taken off of something else, otherwise you would have more than 24 hours of "stuff" in your day.

Since the FS exercise calculations are a little high, a lot of us have found that if you start with only sleeping and resting for a 24 hour period, then subtract your actual exercise from your resting time, and exclude the rest of your day (sitting, standing, driving, desk work etc.), it will sort of balance itself out for a more accurate calories in/calories out calculation. At that point every deficit totalling 3500 calories should be representative of approximately a lb. loss.

This may be oversimplification for what you want, but I ignore the exercise calendar. I calculate my deficit based on what FatSecret calculates as my resting metabolic rate (and this is pretty high, from what I've noticed) and then my exercise is just "bonus"! If I keep my deficit respectable without adding my exercise, I know that with my exercise will be even better.

I think I'll give it a go now that I understand it a bit better. 3500 burned = 1 lb loss is a good to know. Thanks for your helpful tips

GG 3500 of what burned - please can you tell me? and is it a week? or day?