Eating back calories lost

Yea, I am wondering the same thing. If you enter into the search bar "eating back excersize calories" you will come up with a bunch of past posts where people discuss this exact topic. It seems to be controversial and everyone has a different opinion. I have lost 60 lbs over the past 18 months and have NOT eaten them back, however, I am now to the point where I have hit a plateau and would like to lose about 9 more lbs but the scale doesn't move so I am thinking of trying to eat at least half of them back...probably not all of them. . As some people explain it, MFP already sets it up so you have a deficit in your calories from food, but if you excersize your body needs fuel. I am still very confused and wondering if I should do this or not because I work out a ton.

Yes, EAT BACK YOUR CALS.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24Iw1thBlLA&feature=plcp

Here's the deal with exercise calories. Losing weight is about eating fewer calories than you burn daily. However, not every burns the same amount of calories daily, and a lot of people trying to lose weight will take up exercising. Because of this, it can be tricky to figure out what your daily calorie burn is.

MFP handles this problem by treating exercise calories as separate. If you fall of the wagon with your exercise (it happens with all new habits, after all), you can still lose weight because it isn't calculated into your daily calorie use. But if you do exercise, well, now your calorie expenditure for the day is up, so you can eat more and still lose the same amount of weight (3500 calories = 1 lb.).

Eating back your exercise calories is especially important if you are exercising a great deal. Some people choose not to eat them all back in order to create sort of a buffer to account for overestimations of exercise. If you aren't exercising that much, you may not need to eat the calories back, and you can treat them as a sort of bonus.