Calorie Adjustment

newwed412

I have an Apple Watch and my question is, do you set your level to sedentary and then just let the calories from your watch that sync with mfp be your adjustment?

tinkerbellang83

If you exceed your activity level you will earn extra calories, if you don't reach it and you have negative adjustments enabled you will have calories taken off. So really it doesn't matter whether you have it at sedentary or your actual activity level.

I personally have mine (Garmin) set to Lightly Active because I know I will hit the step count for that level of activity fairly consistently day-to-day because I walk to/from work (6km) Mon-Fri and continue to be fairly active on weekends. That gives me a good base calorie amount to go on.

MegaMooseEsq

A lot of people do it that way. I do not, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s a bad way to go. Give it a try for a few weeks and see what you think!

malibu927

tinkerbellang83 wrote: »

If you exceed your activity level you will earn extra calories, if you don't reach it and you have negative adjustments enabled you will have calories taken off. So really it doesn't matter whether you have it at sedentary or your actual activity level.

I personally have mine (Garmin) set to Lightly Active because I know I will hit the step count for that level of activity fairly consistently day-to-day because I walk to/from work (6km) Mon-Fri and continue to be fairly active on weekends. That gives me a good base calorie amount to go on.

This. I’m set to lightly active with my Fitbit because I’d rather start off with more calories (I almost always hit 10,000 steps on work days) and have negative adjustments to motivate me to go for a walk on my off days.

colors_fade

newwed412 wrote: »

I have an Apple Watch and my question is, do you set your level to sedentary and then just let the calories from your watch that sync with mfp be your adjustment?

Yes, that is exactly what I did when I had a FitBit, and it's still what I do now just tracking with MFP. Sedentary.

I found that to be way more accurate.

In fact, what I've found to be most accurate when dealing with TDEE and exercise is always use Sedentary. Calculators have this tendency to overestimate exercise calories. People wonder why they aren't losing, or are hitting plateaus, and it's because they're logging exercise calories that are not real. In my experience, exercise calories are easier to misjudge and get wrong than food calories. And accurate logging is the key.

sllm1

I do sedentary with my Fitbit and disable the negative calorie adjustment, because, mentally, I don't like seeing that low number early in the day.