The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Notes -
Is eating 100 calories and walking two miles (supposing that, at my height and weight, one mile walked burns an additional 50 calories above TDEE) chemically the same thing as eating nothing and doing nothing? I'm in the middle of a weight loss campaign and love to walk, but am continually baffled at the futility of "exercising to lose weight."
Assuming your math is correct, then there are two opposing processes at play:
like @JhanicManifold said, your body reduces NEAT when it's tired and tries to entice you to eat more calories
cardio improves your cardiovascular system and endurance
Assuming you have your food intake under control and thus the number of calories is fixed, walking two miles shouldn't tire you out to affect NEAT in any meaningful way other than replacing NEAT for these 40 minutes. Just don't count it as exercise at all, so no +100 cal.
Reducing NEAT due to systemic fatigue means stuff like doing cardio that you can barely finish when the hour is over. For example, instead of walking two miles you run six miles in an hour. I am not a good runner, so this would tucker me out. The calculator says that's 750 calories, so now I actually need to worry about how many hours it takes for me to recover from it. If my hourly NEAT is 50 calories and I go into full lay-flat mode for the rest of the day (1 hour of cardio + 15 hours of being awake), then I could've burned 800 calories and burned only 750. If it's just for a few hours, then it's a good deal.
If, however, I were a more active person and my normal activity level was constantly buzzing around the apartment and not staring at the screen all day, then doing hard cardio would affect me much more. Let's say my average hourly NEAT was 150 calories. Let's say I crash for a three hours to watch a movie and then spend twelve hours more being slower than usual, consuming only 100 calories. That's 750+10012 = 1950 vs 15016=2400, a clear loss.
You might have noticed that I've been pulling the numbers out of my ass. That's the problem with estimating TDEE and its constituent components, so most people rely on rules of thumb: as long as your cardio is light enough that you don't notice it affecting the rest of your day (or the following day), doing it is a good idea to increase your TDEE without boosting your hunger. Just don't "compensate" for it by eating whatever the calculator tells you.
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