Should I stop eating my exercise calories?

You'll probably have to experiment to find out.

You could be overestimating your exercise calories, underestimating your food calories, or a little of both.

If I were you, I would really take a look at what you are putting down for food calories. Are you weighing your portions? Are you not reporting little things, like ketchup, salad dressing, etc? How accurate do you think you are? Then look at your exercise calories - are you using HRM data? Or your BMR - have you adjusted that lately for your lower weight? Finally, think about water weight - is there any reason you could be retaining water? Higher sodium foods lately? TOM?

Hopefully one of these things will be the culprit.

This subject is so confusing I think too! Since I have beefed up my workout program I do eat some of my exercise calories back but not all of them unless it's the weekend

I never eat my exercise calories, I know I can't lose weight if I go over my 1200 calories a day. I use the extra calories burned during the week to have some drinks with friends on the weekends. I can't get away with much more than that.

bump

I think it's essential to just eat when you are hungry and to stop when you are full. If some days you eat back your excercise calories and some days you don't, that's fine. I don't think that burning 600 calories allows you to eat 600 more calories. The object of losing weight is to burn more than you eat. I think if you focus on just eating when you are hungry then you will be fine. Don't just eat b/c you burned that many calories and can eat them back.

Mfp has my daily cals set around 1500, when I told my PT I was eating that on average he said I needed to up by around 500 a day based on the way I was training. I like you am a healthy weight and would be happy enough to maintain around this but would like to lose a few inches if possible. Thinking I'll give it a go and see what happens. I know that mfp has already calculate a 500 cal deficit for me so I reckon this will give me an overall deficit if I continue training around 500 cals ( this will allow me to overestimate on exercise and underestimate on food and hopefully stay the same weight ish). Maybe, we'll see what happens!

Go to a gym and get your BMR tested and add 500 calories to your BMR to bulk up and 500 less than your BMR to lose weight.

What kind of workouts are you doing? Cardio? Strength? A combination? For how long?

For me personally, I only lose if I do a combination of both. And I eat back at least half (sometimes all) of my exercise calories, because my 1200 NET cals per day already provides me with plenty of a deficit to lose weight. Besides, if I don't eat enough food to provide me with extra energy, my workouts will cause me to lose lean body mass rather than fat, and that is NOT the kind of weight-loss I want.

I agree with Brandon. If you can afford it, I would try to get your resting metabolic rate tested by a nutritionist. I did this last year when I couldn't get the last stubborn 5 lbs off, and it turned out I was burning about 300 extra cals/day than average people my age/height because I was exercising so often. The nutritionist had me start eating most of my calories.
Now, about 9 months later, I've had a LOT of major life changes that caused me to get out of my exercise routine and gain 15 lbs. I checked in with the nutritionist and this time around, I'm NOT supposed to eat my exercise calories, especially since I'm only fitting in about 3 workouts a week vs 5 or 6.
You've definitely received a lot of good advice on the thread, but everyone is built so differently that I think you should consult an expert. It cost me $85 for the RMR test and analysis, and $105 for the more recent food analyis and diet plan. I think both are well worth it!

You have to find what works for you...I eat if Im hungry regardless of calories consumed via workout...but I try to stay within a range and stick with my workout routines

I've had this conversation with several people in the gym, and all of them gave me the same piece of advice; "Don't eat back the calories, it's counter productive". =\ For as much as I'd love to take advantage of om nom noming the extra 500 calories or so that I burned, I'm sticking with the advice I was given. I'll probably up my calorie intake a bit more if/when I start working out harder!

It's only counter productive if you are using exercise to create your deficit. MFP already sets up your *healthy* deficit without exercise. By exercising while using MFP's settings, you are creating a larger deficit which may be unhealthy, depending on how much weight you have to lose and how big your pre-exercise deficit is, and could actually hinder weight loss. Most trainers are not thinking of deficits the way MFP has them set up, so they are giving advice based on insufficient understanding of the program.

OP - if I were you I would try lowering your weekly weight loss goal, as you mentioned and see how that goes for at least a month (while eating at least half your exercise cals). This will increase your calories. But as loads of people on here will tell you, the solution to a plateau is not to eat less (particularly if you are already at 1200) but to eat more. The closer you get to goal, the closer to maintenance you have to eat in order for the weight to come off. A person shouldn't go from eating 1200 (as an example) during their entire weight loss, then jump to 1600 for maintenance, it should be a gradual increase as you change your goal from 1lb/wk to .5lb/wk to maintenance.

You have to find what works for you...I eat if Im hungry regardless of calories consumed via workout...but I try to stay within a range and stick with my workout routines

Well said girl!!

As long as you won't be hungry, try dropping your daily calories a little and see if it helps. If not, try something switching something else. Maybe a different type of workout or eating your exercise calories one day and not the next. Different things work for different people.