Eating exercise calories?

It depends on what kind of exercise you're doing and what your base calories are set for. I'm going to give different advice to someone eating 1600 calories a day and lifting weights 3x a week than I am to someone eating 1200 calories a day and running or doing crossfit 5x a week.

But generally, I say eat back most of them. If you really think your burn is being overestimated by a lot, change how you calculate it to try an be more accurate. I stopped using MFP burn calculations awhile ago because they consistently underestimated my cardio burns and over estimated my strength training. So, I got a HRM for cardio and read up on calculating burn for weight lifting. Neither is 100% accurate, but I felt like they were much closer than MFP.

For me, it all depends on how accurately you can work out the expenditure , calorie wise of your exercise. If it's accurate..eat them all ish. If not aim for half and tinker with it until you see what works for you

I recently bought a hrm and although I am out of condition.. the monitor says I am burning more than any online calculator.. so I eat more. I am not far off where I want to be weight wise.. but need more fitness and to reduce my bf%

In RE to estimating calorie burn from exercise, I always used several sources...I started with my HRM and then compared that number to various formulas that are out there for running, swimming, cycling, etc. I generally ended up taking about 80% of what my HRM told me I burned. For weight training I use a formula. Databases are often off due primarily to the fact that people tend to substantially overestimate their level of effort...they're tired at the end so they put "vigorous"...when in reality, they're just out of shape and were working at a relatively modest level of effort.

In RE to eating them back, this is the way MFP is set up because exercise isn't included in your activity level and thus unaccounted for activity. MFP doesn't give you credit for exercise until you've actually done it and logged it. Other calculators will include some estimate of your exercise burn in your activity level...obviously with those calculators you would be double counting if you ate back those calories as they are already accounted for in your activity level.

It also depends on the exercise...I only logged my true, honest to goodness workouts. I walk frequently and never really logged that as exercise and just figured it was a little extra...but my actual running and cycling and lifting all needed to be fueled...it's pretty tough to actually make any headway towards achieving your fitness goals without adequate fuel.

I do a body pump class twice a week, spin twice a week, a strength training/cardio class once a week and Pilates once or twice a week, my daily is set a little under 1600
Each class is an hour long

My personal recommendation would be to eat 2/3 to 3/4 of them back as a start. If you're feeling hungry still or lack energy, eat back more. If your weight loss starts to stall (meaning you go a month without some decent loss), eat back less. It's all a guessing game, but you're expending a lot of energy in those types of workouts so I would start out eating back most of them. And as I said, that is just my opinion based on personal experience and what I've seen on these boards and learned through educating myself on fitness.

Thank you for the responses, I have been eating back some if not all of the exercise calories but have yet to make any real headway with my weight loss, although I feel a lot better than I did when I started

Make sure that you're weighing and measuring all of your foods when you log. We can't see your diary, but it's not uncommon for people who are eyeballing their portion sizes to underestimate their calorie intake.

I recently bought a hrm and although I am out of condition.. the monitor says I am burning more than any online calculator.. so I eat more.

This is exactly how people on MFP get in trouble. The less fit you are, the more the HRM overestimates burn, so the more of it you eat back, the more of your hard-earned deficit you're wiping out.