Eating back exercise calories?

I am going to say what others have said, and that is, I am sure MFP intends for you to eat them. My main reason for stating this is because when I logged everything for the day and click the finish log, if I am under, it tells me so and that it is not healthy, I should eat the allotted calories. I have my profile set to sed. and that means I am allotted 1300 cals to sit on my *kitten*, if I burn 300 cals and dont eat those back, I will only be getting 1000 cals and the I am sure the body goes into starvation mode because you are not getting enough to sustain daily function so to speak, and in essence you are starving yourself. I hope what I have said makes sense. I mean, don't force yourself to eat them all back, but if you are hungry, do not hold yourself from eating them either.

I eat back at least part of my exercise calories, because my goal isn't weight loss necessarily, as it is that I want to gain muscle definition. My daily calorie intake is about 1500 without exercise, and about 1900-2000 on days I exercise. (I am 5'3"). I would not be able to build more muscle and get stronger if I ate at a severe deficit (though most days, I usually have a small deficit, because I don't want to "force" myself to eat if I am not hungry... I listen to my body). Also, if I got a teensy bit over, or just have a day where I ate too much food, I just make sure to get in a few more workouts that week to balance it out.

I find that running, for whatever reason, suppresses my appetite. On days I do weight lifting, I am ravenous and could eat an entire cow (though MFP sucks for determining how much I should eat on lifting days, so for now, I'm just listening to my body's hunger cues)

I think if you have a lot of weight to lose, you can get away with not eating back your workout calories. But, the closer you get to your goal, I think you'll be setting yourself up for a long frustrating plateau or even weight gain if you don't eat it back. (This is just purely anecdotal, but this seems to be something a lot of MFPers complain about, that they plateaued or even gained back, and then they up their calorie intake and start losing again)

When I joined mfp the first time I was here to lose weight and yes I ate my exercise calories back. I had already been through the whole netting 800 to 1000 net calories a day thing and have permanent heart damage to prove it. Mfp calculates a healthy deficit into your daily goals. This is usually set to sedentary (meaning NO EXERCISE). When you do exercise you increase the deficit that mfp has already created for you. Eat you exercise calories and your deficit will still be the same.

This time I am here to focus on fitness and maintaining my weightloss. I lost a lot of LBM from starving myself so I am trying to work on building strength again and hopefully rebuild some of what I lost. I know this will be a long process but I did it to myself so... I eat 2500 to 3000 to maintain based on TDEE.

I generally don't eat back my exercise calories, but reading this thread has made me feel like I should.

My understanding: When we fill out the information section you put height, weight, age, activity level and .5, 1, 1.5, or 2 lbs a week loss and MFP gives us a number that is minus the calories required for a loss. So if it gives you 1500 calories a day and you want to lose 2 lbs a week your actual number was 2500 -1000 for the calories needed to burn the 2 lbs. So you have a 1000 calorie deficit already. If you burn 700 calories and don't eat them back your deficit becomes 1700 instead of 1000.