Should I be eating back my exerciae calories?

You can eat them back if you want to, you will still be at a deficit. If you don't eat them back you will have a larger deficit, will lose weight faster, but it might also lower your lbm. Try to incorporate some strength training so that you can retain lbm as you lose. As you get closer to your goal weight, you might find that eating exercise calories back is more important, as you won't have the fat stores for your body to draw from.

It all depends. Are you using a Heart Rate Monitor, (HRM), to determine your calorie burn? Does the calorie burn calculator you use subtract the calories you'd burn if you weren't working out, the ones you burn to breathe, have your heart beat, etc? BMR

Rule of thumb would be, make sure your "net" calories hit 1200 at least.

Here's your test. Eat half of your exercise calories back, and see if you continue to lose weight. If so, try eating all of your exercise calories back. If you stop losing weight, go back to eating 1/2. The one thing you don't want to do is eat too little. That will ruin everything.

The settings in terms of activity that you choose are meant for your profession-- not for your activity outside of work. Because I work at a desk job, although I work out a lot after work, I chose sedentary for my lifestyle and log all of my exercise outside of work. In this case, you eat your exercise calories back. If someone is a gardener for a profession, and they then had their setting set at a higher activity level, their exercise during the day gardening is already accounted for so they would not log gardening and they would not eat back their gardening exercise calories. If they did extra exercise after the fact though they'd log that and eat back those calories. With you, since you have a desk job, the best bet is probably to set your mode to sedentary and log your exercise and eat those calories back. If you're already accounting for your exercise in the mode you have set then you do not eat your exercise calories back, however, if you are not accounting for your exercise in the mode you have set, do indeed eat most of those calories back. Hope this makes sense.

So with me choosing lightly active would that also include my 5 days a week of exercise? Or should I choose moderately active to include that?

Let me just say...I've been on this site since 2007. I've been around the boards long enough to post 16000 times (I know, not a great resume point) ...but I also lost 55 pounds and have kept it off by using only MFP's numbers.

They don't "grossly overestimate" exercise calories. Use either/or on the "lightly" or "moderate" question. I personally have learned through trial and error that the higher of the two (so, Moderate) works for me. This is a personal experience, and you are going to have to do some experimentation - and it's only 100 calories or so a day difference. You are making that many errors in calculation of food every day, so...

You still need to manually add in the calories burned on your exercise, and eat those calories earned, regardless of how you set up your Goals.

Just try it - give it a month. If you don't lose weight, come back with all your new info, including your Food Diary open to viewing, post a new topic, and ask for help. It always worked and is working for me.

Congrats on your weight loss and keeping it off... As I said 'SOMETIMES' grossly over estimates the calorie burn.. depending on the activity you are doing... just because the numbers worked for you doesnt mean they will work for everyone else... there are plenty of forum posts that will agree that the database here is not always accurate. When I purchased my HRM in the beginning of the year there were a lot of differences between HRM burn and MFP burn.. sometimes a 200 calorie difference.

I eat back sometimes just to stay out of starvation mode. Keeps weight loss going on...