Do you use your extra calories

I've generally eaten all of my carefully estimated exercise calories, all through about a year of losing from class 1 obese to a healthy weight, then 9+ years of maintaining a healthy weight since.

Yeah, it is a bit of trial and error for some people. There are so many ways we can screw up calorie numbers and exercise calories is but one way.

I always left them turned on, used all of them and lost weight just fine: not too fast and not too slowly. I lost 80ish pounds in 2007-08 and I've kept it off. It takes a few weeks of logging to see how you do. There are a lot of variables with weight loss numbers.

No harm in trying that to see if you lose better…. some swear by not eating them..others eat them all and swear by that.

bottom line.. we are all different and by trying different strategies you could stumble upon something that really works for you.

Best of luck. I hope it does work.

Exactly this. Justine Ercole said it really well in a video when she said the problem with tracking exercise calories is that it's highly inaccurate and just one more way to overcomplicate calorie counting and one more way to make big counting mistakes and end up eating a lot more calories than you should be. Unless, of course, you're a marathon runner or work out 4 hours a day. If you do that, I'm not talking about you.

averaging exercise plans is basically just going more with a Tdee counting method which if your weekly exercise is somewhat consistent is going to be the safest way to not over complicte things and run the risk of being less accurate overall. If we're to be anecdotal with things, that is my method.

I eat most of my exercise calories, otherwise I'd consistently be eating under 1200 cals a day. I look at the weekly averages on the app though, as some days I may not eat them all but on some days I eat more calories than I've burned. It worked when I was losing weight and it's still working now.

It depends on what kind of exercise calories you’re talking about, as others have said.

I typically record 500-1000 per day exercise calories. What I find for myself is, days I’m working out a lot, I’m not typically that hungry and seldom eat them back. But days I’m lower end, I am hungry and do eat most of them.

What helps me is to drill down to the 7-day view and look at net calories, which is a seven day average taking into account my regular daily goal, plus any exercise calories I have earned versus what I’ve eaten and recorded in my diary. I have a certain net weekly goal, and as long as I’m close to that, I’m fine. I don’t sweat the daily calories.

Data is your friend. Log and learn. Your body is always in flux and it’s your responsibility to identify trends and learn from them to preserve your health and mobility.

You’ll find fascinating tidbits. I spent last week on the west coast visiting family. I ate at or above goal most days, but did no exercise, few steps, and, frustratingly, spent most the visit napping because I picked up a bug on the plane (?) over. 

I averaged about 800 net calories per day above normal all last week. 

Weighed in upon returning and was up several pounds. Less than a day later I was at my lowest weight in months, down5.4 pounds. 

Yesterday, I was still feeling the effects and left 1200+ calories on the table before hitting the sack. Yep. Weight up a couple of pounds this morning. But because I recognize from following my data, I’m not worried. 

I’m also going to make a point to eat above average today, because yesterday was so ridiculously low cal.

Is this nit picky? Yes, but it’s also calming, reassuring, and gives me a baseline to know what’s a good daily net average for me, including all the exercise. 

Build yourself that data base, and learn from it. MFP has some great tools in that “nutrition” tab at the very bottom (on the iOS app, anyway) of the food diary page.