Having trouble with my TDEE

jen_092

I was wondering if anyone can help me with my TDEE calculation. Most calculators say my BMR is about 1540 (I'm a 5'7 female, age 24, 167lb). I'm heading into maintenance soon and want to make sure I get it right. I plan to start lifting next week and start recomp in the spring.

The part I struggle with calculating is the daily/weekly activity - I never know what to put on those drop down menus. I get very wide ranging results sometimes. I do work a desk job, because I'm a graduate student and work at a computer most of the day, but I walk around campus a little to get here and there, and it's a 10 minute walk to my car from my office. I usually walk about 7k steps a day on average. On the weekends I usually go for a walk or a short hike, nothing crazy. If I do actual cardio like a more difficult hike or snowshoeing I enter it as exercise. But I also sit on the couch a lot, and some days I barely leave my bed (student life). Point being, it's hard to know what category I fit into. Is there a way to take average steps walked per day and calculate about how many calories to add to BMR from there?

SusanMFindlay

Yes. Every 2,000 steps adds somewhere in the ballpark of 100 calories (unless you're very heavy or very tiny; it's a sliding scale based on weight).

Sedentary at MFP already accounts for ~3,000 steps (plus some standing around). So, add about 200 calories to the sedentary setting here - which will likely put you at about 100 cals/day less than "lightly active". Or just add 350 cals to your BMR - but that will probably be a bit of an underestimate.

jen_092

SusanMFindlay wrote: »

Yes. Every 2,000 steps adds somewhere in the ballpark of 100 calories (unless you're very heavy or very tiny; it's a sliding scale based on weight).

Sedentary at MFP already accounts for ~3,000 steps (plus some standing around). So, add about 200 calories to the sedentary setting here - which will likely put you at about 100 cals/day less than "lightly active". Or just add 350 cals to your BMR - but that will probably be a bit of an underestimate.

Thank you! That's good to know about the MFP setting, because I have it set to sedentary now. I once read that it is treated more like a BMR estimate and I knew that couldn't be right with how fast I'm losing.

PAV8888

7000 steps is squarely in the range of lightly active.

Based on observation of various fitbit and garmin trackers and using myself and a limited number of friends as examples:
3500+ steps exhausts the limits of sedentary
8500+ steps starts moving beyond lightly active
12500+ steps starts moving beyond active
15500+ steps start moving beyond very active (**a few times I've gotten to 16500 before I got a positive adjustment to very active; but a few times I've had one as early as 12000 steps in)

MFP is set to 1.25x Mifflin St Jeor BMR for sedentary, increasing to 1.4x, 1.6x and 1.8x for lightly active, active and very active. The multipliers chosen are not identical to those chosen by other sites for similar labels as MFP was initially designed to add deliberate exercise on top.

elenavans

So, I am 5'10 and I am around 195 pounds. Some calculators put my BMR around 1690 kcal a day. So a mere 150 kcal more than yours.

I am sitting 10 hours straight, 5 days a week in my desk job, but I am aiming for 3 weight lifting sessions per week and 3 LISS sessions per week. I consider myself sedentary-lightly active and I am rarely eating less than 1800-2000 kcal a day. When I am cutting, I aim for 20 % drop which would be 1500-1600 and falls just within the MFP calculation.

flatlndr

The 100 cals per 2k steps sounds like a reasonable rule of thumb.

I used to try to figure it all out, but now that I have an activity tracker on all the time, I do the following:
- I set my base intake to match a sedentary level
- If my activity level gives me exercise credit, then I take in less than 50% of that, to a max adder of about 500 cals (unless I'm doing something extended, like an all-day hike, where I'll take in the full 50%).
That seems to keep me balanced.

Something that worked for me going into maintenance was to ramp into it slowly. For example, if I were cutting at 2000, but my maintenance target is 2500, I ramp from cut to maintenance, a week at a time ...
- Week 0: 2000 cals
- Week 1: 2100 cals
- Week 2: 2200 cals
- Week 3: 2300 cals
- Week 4: 2400 cals
- Week 5: 2500 cals
It made for a nice smooth landing for me.

Good luck!

ahoy_m8

Have you been tracking calories and weight accurately during loss? If so, and if (big IF) your activity/exercise is consistent from week-to-week (on average), you can use your weight change and intake data to calculate your actual TDEE without estimating activity.

Pick a time period (e.g. 10 weeks): (total calories consumed + total weight loss*3500)/total #days=average TDEE over that time period.

StaciMarie1974

How much have you been losing? One way to go about it is to gradually increase your cals in. Such as take what you're eating now, and eat 250 more per day. Give it 4-6 weeks. Are you still losing weight? If so, increase calories in by another 100-200. Test for 4-6 weeks. And so forth. The key is to give it long enough that you can see the trend.

jen_092

Thanks everyone! Yeah, I seem to be losing at a rate of about 1.5 lbs per week but my activity level is all over the place. When on winter break from school I sit around a lot. Christmas made things weird. I also took a trip this weekend and gained some water weight. But overall seems like 1.5/week according to my Excel doc which is cool since I'm eating a very reasonable 1700 calories a day. Chalk it up to my youth I guess!

I still have more to lose. I'll try to increase calories now that I'll be starting lifting and back on campus walking more. That way by the time I hit goal of 155 or so I'll be able to transition to maintenance better. So cool to have everyone's help, thanks!