Are all office workers sedentary?

WinoGelato

JaxxieKat wrote: »

I am an office worker who also spends about 3-5 hours a day manually moving boxes that weigh 20+lbs around a warehouse, so I consider that lightly active when combined with my exercise, but I don't log my exercise.

Why don’t you log your exercise?

JaxxieKat

WinoGelato wrote: »

Why don’t you log your exercise?

Couple of reasons. First one being that my day-to-day energy expenditure on the job can vary. Second is that I find my Fitbit seems very enthusiastic about estimating my daily calorie burn (some days just getting in 10k steps and no extra cardio it says I burned 2900 calories). Since exercise calorie burn is such a finicky thing, I prefer to say I'm lightly active, rather than sedentary, and stick with the calorie allotment given to lose .5lb a week.

PAV8888

JaxxieKat wrote: »

WinoGelato wrote: »

Why don’t you log your exercise?

Couple of reasons. First one being that my day-to-day energy expenditure on the job can vary. Second is that I find my Fitbit seems very enthusiastic about estimating my daily calorie burn (some days just getting in 10k steps and no extra cardio it says I burned 2900 calories). Since exercise calorie burn is such a finicky thing, I prefer to say I'm lightly active, rather than sedentary, and stick with the calorie allotment given to lose .5lb a week.

Is your goal to lose 0.5 lbs a week and are you achieving it, or are you overachieving it. How carefully do you log intake?

Objectively, for most other people in the world based on the common definitions in use, your physical activity at work without any extra exercise (defined as 3+ hours of walking around carrying 20lb boxes) would qualify them in the active to very active category.

gentledreams

I have an office job and sometimes I can easily park my rear end on my chair at 7AM and realise at 11AM that I have not moved for four hours So I try to compensate outside of work, I walk everywhere, going to the gym 2-3 times a week, going to swim once a week when I can. I recently started to get off the bus a mile from home and walk the rest of the way. All this means I now average 10k steps a day but I still put my activity level to sedentary as I feel that is what is natural to me, and all the rest is going out of my way.

tinkerbellang83

gentledreams wrote: »

I have an office job and sometimes I can easily park my rear end on my chair at 7AM and realise at 11AM that I have not moved for four hours So I try to compensate outside of work, I walk everywhere, going to the gym 2-3 times a week, going to swim once a week when I can. I recently started to get off the bus a mile from home and walk the rest of the way. All this means I now average 10k steps a day but I still put my activity level to sedentary as I feel that is what is natural to me, and all the rest is going out of my way.

10000 steps is far from sedentary. It's considered Active, if you don't have a tracker synced, that can cause your deficit to be substantially higher than might be considered healthy for your goals. Of course reviewing what your weight does over a period of 4-6 weeks vs what you expected it to do over that same period is the easiest way to evaluate how accurate your activity level truly reflects what you're doing.

Just know that many people struggle here because they set too high a deficit and/or too low an activity level.

dolliesdaughter

I am an office worker, but I workout M-F 4:15a with Cathe DVD's and I run 3xs per week after work. I throw in swimming and Zumba as well. I also walk on my breaks and take the steps. I do not less than 15k steps per day, 7 days per week. Sitting on your bum in an office is not good.