Exercise Cals

I eat part of them.. especially if I am hungry.

I eat them all. I never feel like I wasted time, because I work out to look fit and I eat right to lose weight. I don't work out to increase my calorie deficit, in fact, I work out partly to be able to enjoy more food, guilt free.

Here's what I do personally:

--I keep the estimates relatively low-ball
--Saturday/Sunday I eat everything plus roughly 500 (this weekend is an extreme aberration from the norm)
--Monday thru Friday I will leave at least enough on the table to displace the weekend's +1000, and usually more (I've tended to run around -1400 to -2100 through the weekdays)

I know that this has been hashed and rehashed...and then hashed again...

But I typically DO eat up to half of my exercise cals back. Then I feel so bad for doing it and feel like I totally just wasted my time.

What are your thoughts on exercise cals? To eat or not to eat?

Definitely not a waste of time eating them back, because the way MPF is set up, you were already at a calorie deficit before you worked out and logged those exercise cals. So if you ate to your daily goal, didn't exercise at all, you should still lose weight because that goal is a deficit. When you exercise, you're creating an even larger deficit, that's why MFP adds them to your daily goal and expects you to eat them back.

Some people swear by it, some don't. I would say that if you're set at 1200 cals, or even 1300 (both of which are likely below your BMR - what they'd give you daily if you were in a coma), you should really eat them back. Otherwise you're leaving your body with very few net calories to run on, giving your body a reason to store fat rather than burn it, and in the long run can do some damage to your metabolism, and that's no good. If you can get a good HRM to give you a better estimate of your exercise burns, that's helpful too - many have found that MFP's estimates for calories burned can be very high compared to a HRM.