Can someone help me determine my activity level?

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  • merbear787
    merbear787 Posts: 82 Member
    edited October 2016
    I've got my Fitbit set for negative adjustments but almost never see that happen except for my rest days on Sunday. :) I've got my settings at sedentary with a goal of 1lb per week weight loss, and it's given me 1460 before additional activity. I'll try this for a week and see how it goes! If I lose over 1lb or feel low on energy I'll scale my weight loss goal back a bit or increase my activity level. I think I'll trust my Fitbit more because at first I was super weary to see such a large adjustment (it gave me back 1,000 calories one day) but I'll plan on eating back about 50% of those.
  • kshama2001
    kshama2001 Posts: 28,052 Member
    RobD520 wrote: »
    queenliz99 wrote: »
    I would go with sedentary and eat back your purposeful exercise calories.

    No one has ever explained to me how someone burns calories different with activity based upon whether or not it is "purposeful". Why does activity that is not "purposeful exercise" not count? I usually get 15000-20000 steps in addition to my workouts just going through life. My net calories would be VERY low were I not to count any of this activity.

    I agree with you. My mom gets very little "purposeful exercise" but since she has so much non-purposeful activity always struggles to keep out of Underweight.
  • SusanMFindlay
    SusanMFindlay Posts: 1,804 Member
    edited October 2016
    RobD520 wrote: »
    queenliz99 wrote: »
    I would go with sedentary and eat back your purposeful exercise calories.

    No one has ever explained to me how someone burns calories different with activity based upon whether or not it is "purposeful". Why does activity that is not "purposeful exercise" not count? I usually get 15000-20000 steps in addition to my workouts just going through life. My net calories would be VERY low were I not to count any of this activity.

    It very much counts. It's just really hard to log as a single item and that's why people who get a lot of steps should *not* use sedentary as a baseline (unless they have a FitBit or similar synced to the account to overrule that, in which case, chosen activity level would be mostly irrelevant).

    That said, "sedentary" does include the calories a desk-bound person would burn going to the bathroom, cooking dinner, taking out the garbage, etc. so they shouldn't be logging those separately. Once you get past about 5000 steps per day, you're not "sedentary" anymore.

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