Should one consume the calories spent during excercise

Yes you should.
Maintaining weight: calories in = calories out.
So 300 more calories out requires 300 more calories in.

However, be careful with how you calculate exercise calories.
MFP always overestimates exercise calories.
I don't know about your tracker. Perhaps start with not eating all of them and see how it works.

I set myself to sedentary and eat all my additional calories from my fitbit. Before that I ate all the calories I logged. If you use the MFP method, you should only eat exercise calories above your baseline activity level.

hearthwood wrote: »

Nope--don't do that. It's a good rule of thumb to never eat back more than 1/2 of calories burned. MFP, and most electronic devices, including machines have a history of overestimating calories burned. Plus there's no harm in losing a couple of more pounds if you are exercising.

NO, this is NOT correct (other than the rule of thumb bit).

Among other thing the OP said they want to maintain, not lose a couple of more pounds.

But, the 50% rule of thumb exists because people:

a) often under-estimate their calories in (especially if not weighing their food)
b) do not understand what happens when the 1200/1500 floor calorie floor kicks in (and their deficit caps at a lower level than the deficit they think they have)
c) do not account for the fact that exercise burns as stated are not NET burns.
d) assume that NET burns are Burn - BMR as opposed to the actual (for our purposes) Burn - Calories MFP has assigned to the specific time interval.
The calories assigned to the time interval could be BMR x 1.2 at MFP's Sedentary level, up to BMR x 1.9 at the extremely active level.
e) even more reasons having to do with the fact that all these numbers are estimations based on populations and the numbers for any individual could be off by quite a bit.

So the rule of thumb gets you to eat 50% of your exercise calories back when you're losing weight because at that level you will probably not fully erase a sizeable deficit, while at the same time you will probably not under-eat by too much if you are going wrong in the opposite direction.

But the most important part, and the one that people often forget is: "and you should adjust that % based on your real life results after a period of a few weeks".

As to the OP, if you are trying to maintain you should probably start with a good 80% to 100% exercise eat back (depending on whether you are more concerned about gaining or losing weight) and adjust after a few weeks as per your real life results.

Also, after a period of caloric restriction you should expect some water weight gains at the beginning of eating at maintenance.