Sedentary vs. Lightly Active

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  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 13,633 Member
    edited April 2019
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    Personal definitions based on various observations and Fitbit data:

    Sub 3,500 often not meeting sedentary calories.

    3500 to 5000 usually sedentary covers it close enough.

    5500 to 8500 classic lightly active.

    8500 to 12500 classic active with the edges a bit iffy and things such as deliberate or indoors or number of bouts of activity coming into play

    12,500 to 15,500 very active.

    Usually above 15500-16,000 you need more than MFP very active.

    Any step generating exercise is already included when using above and not added on top.

    Non step generating would have to be accounted separately remembering that mfp is already giving "BMR x increment" for the time in question. So you would deduct the "x increment" portion to get net activity Calories

  • Strudders67
    Strudders67 Posts: 980 Member
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    Surely if the OP's fitbit is tracking ALL activity and then synching with MFP, some of the exercise is double counted if there's an assumption that steps are part of a Lightly Active lifestyle?

    I don't use a tracker, but I set my activity level to Sedentary because I manually enter all my walks (to/from work) and deliberate exercise. Only the walking around the office doesn't get logged but that would be in the 3000-3500 steps that MFP thinks a sedentary person does.
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 13,633 Member
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    Strudders67 wrote: »
    Surely if the OP's fitbit is tracking ALL activity and then synching with MFP, some of the exercise is double counted if there's an assumption that steps are part of a Lightly Active lifestyle?

    The mechanism of the integration adjustment is such that everything is single counted.

    The detected values could be mucked up by entering a manual exercise to override what was detected; but each time interval would still only be counted once and the adjustment would only be for the calories that were above or below MFP's expectations.
  • MaryFloNS
    MaryFloNS Posts: 19 Member
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    New to the community and I was wondering, why does one need to eat the calories lost through exercise?
  • asliceofjackie
    asliceofjackie Posts: 112 Member
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    MaryFloNS wrote: »
    New to the community and I was wondering, why does one need to eat the calories lost through exercise?

    Think of it this way:

    If your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) is 1500kcal. That means you need that much just to live and breathe, as if you were a vegetable and did nothing all day. Now on top of that you add some kind of activity multiplication, so let's add 300kcal for general livingness (that's totally a word) and thus you need 1800kcal per day just to function.

    If you eat 1800kcal but then proceeed to workout and burn 800 of them, that means you're getting 1000kcal net, which isn't enough to sustain most humans for a longer period of time. Basically, unless your calculator adjusts for it (in which case you won't need to eat them back), working out will only create a larger deficit and when it comes to deficit bigger isn't always better. There's a limit to how large we want our deficits to be, thus we eat some of the calories we've burned back. To end up at a net intake that's reasonable.

    With that said:
    I'm not actually fully sure exactly how MFP specifically does this as I haven't yet looked into the system and equations it uses, but you get the general idea I hope!
  • savithny
    savithny Posts: 1,200 Member
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    What are your step counts like on days you don't work out? I'm skeptical that you'd count as "lightly active" since you generally have to be at about 5000 steps a day to get out of "sedentary," and I have a similar job with similar "walking around the building" requirements. Even when I'm walking a mile to work, I have to add some additional consciously-taken steps to get to 6K steps.

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