Weight lifting activity level? confused? help!

sophierrw

Hello!

I was wondering if you could give me some advice or share your experiences and opinions with me.

Now, firstly, I know everyone is different and therefore we all already have differing BMR's due to muscle mass and other influences.

My stats are:

I am 24, 5ft (and it ends at that!) 7 stone 7 pounds. I started at 8 stone 9.
My BMR is 1160.
My activity levels are then predicted as 1400 sedentary (MFP is 1460), 1600 mark for lightly active, 1800 for moderate and 2000 for very.

I seem to only really be able to lose weight if I go under 1200. This also makes me completely mad and I feel very, very unwell. I also seem to get extremely low blood sugar if I don't eat very regularly or don't ensure that I have a high intake of fat and protein every day.

I have just gotten back into weight lifting and have purchased a Fitbit flex 2. It's currently saying I am burning 1,900 calories just from walking 10,000 steps a day . This hasn't included my weight training which I can't seem to input on the app. When I am very, very sedentary, it says I remain at 1070 which is my BMR. I can't comprehend that my body is able to burn 2,000 calories or over a day just from walking 10,000 steps, let alone even more if I weight train. I also feel 1070 is incredibly low for sedentary calories. It feels these given numbers are both on the extreme levels.

So I was wondering a few things - what do my stats look like to your regarding my BMR and activity level? What are your experiences?
How did you work out your own TDEE's? And how did you add weight training to your activity level? If you have a fitbit, was this accurate for your activity level?


If you're a petite woman like me I would especially love to hear back from you as it is so hard to maintain weight with such a short body!!

Thanks xx

sijomial

Remember exercise isn't part of your activity setting on here so your MFP goal is always plus exercise calories.
That's not how TDEE estimating sites work so be careful about making comparisons between the two.

I simply picked the activity setting that seemed closest for me at the time and after a month or so made manual adjustments to my daily goal based on my actual rate of loss.
That compensated for the inaccuracy inherent in estimating your BMR, activity setting multiplier, food logging and exercise logging.

PS - you log weight training under the cardiovascular part of your diary under heading "strength training". It gives a rough estimate based on your stats and METS.

PPS - the most likely reason you seem to maintain on an unfeasible low calorie allowance is that you are eating more than you think. Food logging inaccuracy is by far the most common problem. Making your food diary public can allow people to spot where you might be going wrong. Bad database entries, not weighing food accurately for example.

PPPS - at your low size/weight (fun sized!) you are going to have a proportionally smaller margin of error and should really be aiming for slow rate of loss. You really need at least a month after changing your calorie allowance to see the true results otherwise you can be misled by normal weight fluctuations.

MegaMooseEsq

I used MFP to track my calories for a few months before I started trying to lose weight. When I was ready to lose, I took all the data I'd accumulated about how many calories I was eating and what my weight was doing and dumped it into a spreadsheet. Then I did some math (with the help of some online calculators - https://www.supertracker.usda.gov/bwp/index.html is my go-to) to figure out my TDEE. At the time I wasn't varying my exercise much from day to day, so it was a little easier to figure out than it might have been. Ultimately, the only way to get as accurate number as possible is using your own data, I suspect at least two months worth. It's time consuming, but I think it's absolutely worth it.