eating exercise calories

If your calorie goal comes from MFP, it's designed for you to eat back the calories burned through exercise.

If you're going to eat back your calories, be extremely careful how you count your exercise calories. Most gym machines overstate them wildly, for instance. There are online tools you can easily Google to find out how many calories you're burning walking, etc., but in general, if you find something suggesting that you're burning at a rate over 5-6 calories a minute even for activity that leaves you sweaty and breathless, it's probably bogus.

Give it a try, and see if you are actually steadily losing weight week after week; if so, you're counting OK. If not, you're eating back too many of your calories, like a whole lot of people who post here wondering why they're on a plateau. (Of course the other common problem is undercounting food calories. Sometimes we do both! :-) It takes a while to get the hang of it, and it's the scale that will tell the true tale over time. At the beginning, it's time to experiment and see what works.)

I tend to allow myself to eat back those calories but I don't always have the appetite to do so. But my own general rule is slightly OVER estimate the calories I'm consuming if there is ever a question and slightly UNDER estimate my calories burned. Doing that tends to leave me room for error without slowing my weight loss or gaining if that makes sense.