Losing while eating back exercise calories

I ate all my exercise calories back while losing weight, after estimating them as carefully as I could. I lost weight fine, and have maintained a healthy weight for around 7 years since, still doing the same.

If someone targets a relatively slow weight loss rate (for their current size), and doesn't do a lot of exercise (small percent of daily calories), it may be fine to let exercise increase one's calorie deficit to lose weight faster . . . especially if they don't have any other major stress in their lives besides the calorie deficit and the exercise. (Stress is cumulative across all sources, physical and psychological, so too much stress - even "good stress" like exercise - is counterproductive.)

However, if someone has a very aggressive weight loss plan, like 1% of body weight weekly (let alone more), or does a large volume of exercise (in context of their total calorie needs), then not fueling that exercise is a recipe for disaster: Exhaustion, over-stress, mood problems, unhealthfully rapid weight loss, possible negative health consequences, and unsustainability to the point of periodic binges or giving up altogether.

In between those extremes is a judgement call, based on how much health risk a person is willing to take.

Someone with fitness goals is likely to be best off fueling their exercise to some extent, because underfueling will hinder athletic/fitness performance.

There are two general ways to account for exercise calories: Either set base calorie goal based on pre-exercise activity and log exercise calories when we do some and eat those, too (the MFP method); or use an outside-MFP TDEE calculator and average planned exercise into one's calorie goal.

In the MFP way, setting activity level (in one's profile) to include exercise, then logging and eating exercise, can lead to double-counting, and slow down weight loss. So can materially over-estimating the exercise calories, and some of the MFP database's exercise estimates can be excessive. (Other methods also have pitfalls, but this post is already too long.)

In the TDEE way, a common problem is to plan an optimistically aggressive exercise program up front, use that plan to get a calorie estimate . . . then not get around to doing all the exercise. That, too, can slow down weight loss.

For me, my exercise load is moderately high (10-20%+ of TDEE most days), plus seasonal and weather-dependent, so the MFP method works best for me as a practical matter.