eating your exercise calories

This is confusing for a lot of people. Here's the explination I give:

The basic idea is that MFP works a bit differently than most calorie/point counters. Most nutrition plans incorporate workouts into your overall activity level- ie I have a desk job, but if I workout 5 days a week most plans would put me at "lightly active". This would figure into my daily calorie goal - so most nutritionists would probably recommend that I eat 1500-1800 calories everyday, regardless of my workout. MFP has you manually account for specific workouts or anything outside your normal level of activity, so you get a lower "starting goal" everyday (so you continue to lose regardless of whether or not you workout), but when you workout more, you should be eating more.

This is where NET calories come into play. There is an equation on your homepage:

GOAL FOOD -(minus) EXERCISE =(equals) NET

Your goal, as far as MFP is set up, should be to get your NET calories to match your GOAL calories. The NET calories are a way of taking exercise into account, so that you eat enough to fuel your workout.

This has in turn become known as "eating your exercise calories" and is highly controversial because people believe that less calories = higher weight loss. But for many, if you do not eat enough on a daily basis, your body begins to shut down your metabolism so as to stave off possible hunger/starvation not only effectively stopping loss but also causing gains anytime one goes even minimally over on calories.

Just for emphasis:

http://shouldieatmyexercisecalories.com

Just as a note to those of you wondering about this, not only do I eat the calories that I'm credited with burning during my exercise, but so should you. The reason is because of how your body reacts to different levels of calorie deficits. If you use the intended model of an approximate 500 calorie deficit per day you can lose weight the healthy way and have a better chance of keeping it off once you reach your goal. Unfortunately some people think and would tell you that crash diets or severely low calorie diets can help you reach your goal faster. And while you may hit a goal number faster (and I emphasize might) you will almost certainly regain the weight very quickly. And the reason that I emphasized "might" in my previous statement is because your body can react to a significant calorie deficit by switching to what we call in the nutrition field as "Starvation Mode". When this happens your body will actually retain food that you eat and convert a higher amount of your caloric intake to fat because fat is the most efficient way to store energy. It's a defense mechanism that your body naturally uses to stop you from starving to death (either voluntarily or involunarily). It's part of the reason why when you see pictures of starving children in Africa they have pronounced bellies. Their bodies store everything as fat, as well as breaking down any muscle tissue they have to convert that protein based tissue into fat.

So in short, as someone in the health and fitness field, I highly recommend you not go significantly below your recommended goal on MFP and that includes eating your calories that you burn with exercise. The system will work, just be patient and let it.

This has nothing really to do with exercise calories, but I would like to correct some slight misinformation stated in the above quote.

The belly you see on children starving in Africa and other underfed nations is a result of a build up of peritoneal cavity fluid, caused by a SEVERE protein deficiency. The body cannibalizes non-essential protein (e.g arm/leg muscle) in order to feed the brain and organs. When that runs out there simply isn't enough of a particular essential protein, which results in capillary leakage into the stomach cavity- which gives the big bellied, thin arms and leg look. The term associated with this reaction is Kwashiorkor. The pronounced belly is not stored fat.