Do people eat their exercise calories

Short answer: If you estimated your calorie goal by including intentional exercise in your activity level setting, don't add extra calories when you exercise. That would be double counting exercise calorie burn. If you didn't consider exercise in your activity level setting, then add exercise and eat those calories, too.

Longer answer: What really matters is your actual weight change over 4-6 weeks. Losing aggressively fast is a bad plan.

If someone chooses a slow weight loss rate, and doesn't do a lot of exercise, it's probably fine to let the exercise increase weight loss pace. If someone doesn't include exercise in their calorie goal (through either method), chooses a fast/aggressive weight loss rate, then does a bunch of exercise on top of that, it's not going to end well. Fast loss increases health risks, risk of giving up, and more. It's a bad plan.

In between, it's a judgement call about how much risk a person wants. I wanted loss to be pretty easy, wanted my exercise performance (and general energy level) to stay high, plus don't want to risk my health. I chose a moderate weight loss rate, estimated my calorie needs without considering exercise, added and ate back my exercise calories . . . through just under a year of losing from obese to a healthy weight, and 8 years of maintaining a healthy weight since. It worked fine.

As long as a person takes exercise calorie burn into account somehow, either method can work fine. Not considering exercise in the estimates, but doing a bunch of it? Probably counter-productive.

Just my opinion, though.

If your goal is to be in a caloric deficit, then you generally shouldn't. In saying that, if you’ve burned a heap of active calories- say 800 or more in a day. Then you should eat more to prevent your daily deficit being too drastic.
You can disable the active calories MFP adds on top of your daily goal in settings.

GazJol wrote: »

If your goal is to be in a caloric deficit, then you generally shouldn't. In saying that, if you’ve burned a heap of active calories- say 800 or more in a day. Then you should eat more to prevent your daily deficit being too drastic.
You can disable the active calories MFP adds on top of your daily goal in settings.

IMO, It would be better to understand the weight management math, and apply it correctly - that's the best if your goal is to be in a calorie deficit while sustaining good health and energy level alongside. It's not that complex to do. Cmriverside's comments are accurate.

Furthermore, the exercise calories can be averaged into base calorie goal rather than added separately: As long as the math is applied correctly, either method will work, and should result in approximately the same average calorie intake.

As an aside, disabling active calories is only possible for people who have premium MFP. It's not possible in the free version.

Personally, I ate every delicious, carefully-estimated exercise calorie - added separately BTW - all through just under a year of losing from obese to a healthy weight, and for 8 years of successful weight maintenance since. Since I lost at a pretty good clip, I don't think adding/eating those exercise calories kept me from being in a deficit.

LOL not sure why this has to be so complicated!

Eat your calories back. Just make sure you don't overestimate your calorie burn. If you ate 1000 calories and burned 3000 calories the same day, you would be stressing your body severely and you wouldn't recover well from that burn. You would lose fat, muscle and essential nutrients. Keep it up and you would get sick and your metabolism would slow down significantly. The goal of diet is to lose fat, not fat + muscle + nutrients.

I don’t use mine at all. Mine come mainly from swimming 50 minutes 3 times per week. In the long run, I may need to begin to eat them but for right now I’m not feeling hungry or tired eating my base calories alone.

MFP is set up for you to eat back exercise calories - that's why it adds them.

If you used the guided setup to calculate your calorie goal - it is *already* at a deficit if you said you wanted to lose weight. Then, if you burn more calories through working out it will create more of a deficit - depending on your numbers you could end up consuming too few calories if you don't eat back your exercise calories.

IF you calculated your daily calorie goal using something other than the guided set up in MFP - then it might be different.....

EDIT: there will be multiple answers from people about whether they ate them back or not. I lost ~25lbs in ~9months and I ate back 100% of my exercise calories.