Will my website get penalized if I include my meta descriptions into the main body copy?
For example my meta description is "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua".
If I include the exact same text into the main body copy, how will Google react to that?
According to Google itself, this is what they have to say about the meta tag description, here.
The description attribute within the tag is a good way to provide a concise, human-readable summary of each page’s content. Google will sometimes use the meta description of a page in search results snippets, if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content. Accurate meta descriptions can help improve your clickthrough;
This means your description is used as an indication to Google of what is inside the page and also as the text used in the snippets, providing information to the user that might lead him to click in your page, if it appears in the Search Engine results page.
When developing a website, make sure you write for people, not bots. My advice is to don't care if the description is the same as the content as long as it's the appropriate text for your users.
Don't worry about it. Sites like this, using meta description in sidebar.
Generally Google don't consider it duplicate content, so feel free to use it in your body content. Sites like developer.android.com copy paste thousand of lines on many of webpages, but google don't penalize them, not because of it is their own website, but in general it is fine if you do it normal.
