What to class as exercise?

Stewie_Mc

As the title suggests, I'm a little concerned as to what I count as exercise, I've a fairly active job as an electrician so when selecting my goals I went lightly active, me and my colleague are both using mfp now we do a fair bit of walking throughout the day, which my colleague tracks and at the end of the day he adds in to mfp which allows him more calorie allowance, i personally don't as I presumed the fact I've selected the lightly active and my calorie allowance has already taken it in to account.
We both have an allowance of 1650 but his adding the walking is going him an additional 500+ aday ( not that he uses it all)
Any help clearing up this matter would be greatly appreciated

3dogsrunning

I wouldn't count work as exercise, I would account for it in your daily activity. You could probably bump that up from the "lightly active" setting IMO. That would give you some extra calories.

VintageFeline

There's a few ways to deal with this.

You should account for normal daily activity associated with your job in your activity setting as you have done. You can then assess progress in a few weeks and if losing faster than you should be up your intake.

You can also set yourself as sedentary and use a tracker (wrist worn or a smartphone app if you always have your phone on you) which syncs to MFP and automatically makes an adjustment for your steps. This is sort of what your friend is doing.

The other way is to ask your friend how many steps you're getting in on average and adjusting from his steps given you both do about the same. I think lightly active equals to about 7500 steps, active 10'000 and highly active 13'000. I'm sure someone will correct me on that though!

Stewie_Mc

Yes he does track with a wrist watch thing, I'm quite happy just keeping mine as lightly active and not tracking my steps, I do when I go walking at the weekends but I will suggest to him about changing his to sedentary and seeing what the difference is between our allowances are.

DancingMoosie

Track your food for a while, leave your settings as they are for a month. If you lose too quickly, bump your settings to "active".

StaciMarie1974

You can always judge by your results. If you're losing faster than expected: increase your activity level.

StaciMarie1974

If his tracker syncs to MFP, then his activity level does not matter. The tracker overrides the activity level...