Counting without calories

I use the MFP method, and set my base calories for an activity level setting that doesn't include my planned exercise calories. Then I carefully estimate exercise calories, log them, and eat them all. That worked fine for me all through weight loss, and for 9+ years of maintaining a healthy weight since. (As context, I joined MFP at age 59, am now 69.)

The one caveat is needing to recognize that the calorie goal MFP gives us - even the calorie level that a fitness tracker gives us - is based on the average calorie needs of people who are in the same demographic group (age, sex, height, weight, etc.). Most people are close to average, but individuals vary. A few people will be noticeably different from average, and a rare few surprisingly far off average. If we follow the same calorie goal for 4-6 weeks, or at least one full menstrual cycle for women who have those, we can use our average real-world results to individualize our calorie goals based on that experience.

If a person happens to be far off average, which is rare, they may think that eating exercise calories is leading them to eat too much or too little, when that's really not what's going on. Sure, it's important to estimate exercise calories carefully, but they're not the only thing we're estimating during a weight-management effort. In reality, everything is an estimate. Fortunately, we don't need all the estimates to be precisely exact, just workably close. That's achievable.

I'd encourage you not to try to lose weight aggressively fast, especially when you're doing exercise that is "kicking your behind". Calorie deficit is a physical stress, and the bigger the deficit, the greater the stress. Exercise is also a physical stress, even though in the long run that stress can have positive outcomes. Over-exercise for current fitness level - which can express as that "kicking our behind" feeling - is greater stress. Stress is cumulative, over the sum of both physical and psychological stress from all sources. High total stress is bad for health.

If you're feeling fatigued, sore, mentally taxed by your exercise on top of your daily life, and especially if you seem to be losing fast-ish alongside that, I'd definitely encourage you to eat at least some of those exercise calories until you're feeling less taxed overall. If you want to use your real-life loss trend to evaluate your calorie goal in a few weeks, the arithmetic will be easier if you eat back some standard percent of your exercise calories - 50%, 75%, 100%, whatever - rather than eating them sometimes and not other times.

Best wishes!