Should I REALLY eat my exercise calories back?

I don't. No matter how much exercise I do and how many calories I burn I try to eat the allotted calories that I have set for myself -- not the NET calories - period. If I go over on exercise days it's no big deal. On a night that I'm going out and I know I'm going to indulge I consider the exercise calories a "buffer" so that if I go over it's not as big a deal as it would be if I didn't exercise.

This is exactly what I do and it works for me.

i don't eat them back. I can't wrap my mind around it. If I exercise and then eat more...it makes me feel like I exercised for nothing.

So, I guess first you need to ask yourself...is it possible to lose weight without exercising? The answer is yes. Why is that? Because you are eating at a defecit. If you exercise...you have an even bigger defecit...if you eat back your exercise calories...you are still at the original defecit before working out.

Hopefully that helps you wrap your mind around it.

First of all it kind of depends on how you calculate your TDEE and whether the exercise you are doing is already being taken into account. I am not inputting the extra exercise in my TDEE and I just claim I am doing a desk job because this is what I do.

My BMR is 1562 Kcal a day which means that even if I was not doing anything I need that amount of energy to function.

I have a TDEE of 1847 as my daily activity levels (excluding additional exercise) are very low. That still means that daily I would be burning almost 300 kcal more than what I need to survive from doing my daily basic activities.

Therefore the idea is that even if I was not excercising i would be burning some calories per hour an average of 77kcal (1847/24 = 77). and probably even more than that since that would be a time that I am awake and not asleep and therefore it would be towards the higher end. Therefore if I exercise for an hour and burn for example 400 calories, I should not be eating all of them back but a maximum of 400-80 Kcal = 320Kcal and not 400kcal which is what I lost while exercising.

Although I believe that MFP is a great tool, because of things like the above, I use it as a guidance rather than a gospel especially with anything to do with exercise.

I don't and it works just fine for me but there are people who swear that eating them back is the only way they lost weight. Frankly I don't trust the exercise data base nearly enough to even try eating back my calories.

I don't. No matter how much exercise I do and how many calories I burn I try to eat the allotted calories that I have set for myself -- not the NET calories - period. If I go over on exercise days it's no big deal. On a night that I'm going out and I know I'm going to indulge I consider the exercise calories a "buffer" so that if I go over it's not as big a deal as it would be if I didn't exercise.

This is exactly what I do and it works for me.

Ditto and with another 40+ lbs of fat I'm lugging around there's another 140,000 calories available so I don't "starve" myself.

40 pounds of fat does give your body some extra fuel. HOWEVER, not everything your body needs comes from this stored fat. When your body needs to build ... say blood cells... one component is fat ... but the other components are not. This is why your body may catabolize muscle tissue when your calorie deficit is too large.