Confused as to what I should have my calories at...

IowaGal84

I have my calories set for light activity but I am only losing 0.2 a week. I work at Walmart as a Cap Team person so I get roughly 9,000 steps 5 times a week. I am wondering if I should put it at no activity and see if I do any better. I also don't understand if I should eat back my exercise calories that I get from my apple watch.

Any help would be great.

tinkerbellang83

The way MFP is set up you should theoretically eat back all of your exercise calories, however your real world results over 4-6 weeks are the key indicator of how accurate that and your food logging is.

If you're losing less than expected, review your logging, can you be more accurate:

• are you weighing your food (with a food scale) not guesstimating or using cups/spoons as measures?
• are you checking the nutritional content of the database entries when you use them for the first time (the database is user entered and there are a lot of erroneous entries even with barcode scanning)
• choose a fixed amount of your exercise calories to eat back (50% is a good starting point) and do that for 4-6 weeks and then review your losses and adjust accordingly.

If you are getting in 9000 steps per day from work, then you are not sedentary so no you shouldn't set yourself at such.