Only if you don't eat more. Even then, exercise doesn't burn that many
calories. Nice excuse, though ;-)

Exercise doesn't have to increase your appetite.  You get used to it.  I
could maintain my weight with no exercise at 1600 calories a day.  I
regularly burn 500-1000 calories per day in exercise, and eat very little
more than 1600.  I don't feel hungry.  I believe the quality of the food you
put in has a lot to do with how satisfied you feel on less calories.  I'm
pretty careful to get adequate fiber, fresh fruits and veggies, lean
proteins, and healthy fats.

Exercise can eliminate calories which are not balanced on the intake
side, for two reasons.

The first reason is that working muscles burn a mixture of fat and
carbohydrate. (The greater the intensity of exercise, the greater the
reliance on glucose: a note about that later.) Although both fat and
carbohydrate is burned, you replenish only the carbohydrate. The fat
comes from your existing stores and doesn't need to be replenished.
For this reason, you should eat a low-fat diet. How low? As low as
possible, ideally. If you eat enough fat to offset the body fat that
you burn in exercise and all other activity, you will not achieve fat
loss. Your body only needs a small quantity of essential fats from the
diet, and does not ``miss'' the fat that is burned.

The second reason exercise helps is that it creates a carbohydrate
deficit in your body. When you consume carbs after exercise,
particularly after strenuous exercise that severely depletes your
glycogen stores, the carbohydrates go toward refueling that depleted
store. Your muscles essentially gobble up circulating blood glucose.
If you were to eat the same meals when not in a depleted state (like
perhaps before exercise rather than after), you would be overeating
and thus generating new body fat. The generation of body fat from
carbs is partially a dead-end pathway: premium fuel is being
downgraded into second rate fuel which cannot be converted back into
premium fuel. It's like using cash to purchase some non-liquid long-
term asset. And so you have to consume more carbs the next time you
need that premium fuel, just like the way you have to raise new cash
somehow to pay your bills if you tied up existing cash in some assets
that can't be easily liquidated.  Here is where the intensity of
exercise helps: although intense exercise burns more carbs and less
fat, it helps create a greater depletion which in turn means you can
eat more, yet avoid storing new fat. Intense exercise also burns more
energy per unit time. (Intense exercise also supposedly ``revs up''
the metabolism for a period of time, so that your body uses more
energy for some time after the exercise, for supposedly as long as
several hours. I suspect that this effect is overrated.)

Then there is also a whole different effect that comes into play. If
you commit yourself to becoming an athlete, and work up to a high
training volume, and stick with it week after week for years, your
body will change in many ways, with one of the results being that you
can quite easily stay lean. That's not to mention the health benefits.

Another thing to consider is that since exercise creates a greater
demand for energy in your body, you can obtain a lot more nutrients,
provided that you eat quality food. The greater need for protein and
carbs creates the opportunities to eat a larger volume of healthy
foods which are rich in nutrients without overeating. If diet without
exercising, you can't eat as much, and so to get the nutrients, you
may have to rely on supplementation, or rely on it to a greater
extent.

What else? Oh yeah, resistance exercise. Builds and maintains muscle
mass, strength, coordination, bone density. Enough said.

So, in summary, don't give up on exercise! :)

I have suspected that what you suggest is true.  It would make sense for the
body to refuel after an unusual moderate expenditure.  The examples where
exercise leads to weightloss seem to be extreme exercise, like in the stupid
TV show "Biggest Loser."

Sometimes the experts are adept at tuning out the obvious.

OK, here is something to chew on.  It is known that in a normal weight
person that maintains the same weight for a year, that the persons body has
unconsciously maintained calorie regulation within 1% of perfect balance.
This is commonly recognized as evidence of the body's regulation of eating
behavior.  However, humans have varying day-by-day caloric burn rates.
Activity changes.  Thus, the only way the body could have maintained the
same weight is by taking into account the expenditures from exercise.