Just Walking!

ericadcruz32

Hopefully I am posting this in the right place. I have a question on which walking to input into MFP Exercise section. I can't seem to get any pedometers to link and synch so I have to do it manually. No big deal. But do I enter the equivalent of what my pedometer is saying? So if I've walked 6000 steps total for the day which equates to, let's just say 200 calories...do I need to enter that? What if only 30 mins was on a treadmill at 4 mph and the rest was my typical walking throughout the day. I will add that I am not a slow walker. I tend to blow through every door I can! haha.

Thanks in advance for anyone kind enough to respond.

lin_be

I usually do this equation: my weight in lbs x my distance in miles x .33 = calories burned

And then I go into MFP and manually enter in a number in minutes that displays the calories burned figure under a walking exercise category.

cwolfman13

The thing you have to be careful of is that your activity setting, even set to sedentary is going to include a fair number of steps. If I recall, "sedentary" includes up to 5,000 steps...so those steps would already be accounted for in your calorie target.

pinuplove

Your regular, everyday walking should be considered as part of your activity level when you are choosing that (ie, don't default to sedentary). Anything above and beyond that should be recorded as exercise and additional calories to eat. You can create your own exercise and input the calories based on the formula above if you want.

After 4-6 weeks of consistent logging, you should have a feel for whether or not your routine needs tweaking based on your actual results. That's a much better indicator than all the online calculators in the world.

ericadcruz32

Ah! All of these are super helpful. I didn't think about selecting sedentary for my activity level meant that they already account for 5,000 steps. I may get to 10,000 some days but only a few days a week maybe. Maybe I can log only anything above 5,000.
Thanks!!!

PaytraB

You can put your activity level to sedentary and add only your active exercise time for a month or more and see what your progress is. If you're losing more than expected, up your activity level. If you are on-track, leave things as is.
MFP needs to be adjusted to each individual's body and needs.