Activity level

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florencehw
florencehw Posts: 10 Member
in Getting Started
Hello! Another activity level question, haha.
So on MFP I've set my AL at lightly active. I work full time in a convenience shop, 5 days 9 hours a day. I spend the whole time maybe not 15 minutes on my feet, walking around, filling, etc, etc. Genuinely I don't tend to take a break. My fitbit calculates between 9000-12000 steps per shift. On non-work days I average maybe 6000 steps. This 6000 doesn't include "intentional" walks or exercises like swimming.
Fitbit sends the data over and gives me an extra 400-500 calories, I know this decreases as the day goes on because fitbit calculates your activity so far that day, but it usually ends on about 300-400. But I don't know if I've really set my activity level too low to be having this "extra" allowance. I'm not on a weight loss mission, I'm trying to gain so not sure really if I need to set my AL higher to show me what I really should be intaking?

Hope that makes sense

Replies

  • cmriverside
    cmriverside Posts: 34,080 Member
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    The only way to be sure is to start eating what your FitBit tells you and track your food honestly and accurately for 4-6 weeks. Adjust at the end of that time. It's an experiment we all had to run on ourselves.

    I eat 500 calories per day more than all the different calculators tell me I should be able to eat according to my activity and exercise. I came to that number by tracking and logging over Time.

  • heybales
    heybales Posts: 18,842 Member
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    I'm surprised you don't get more steps actually.
    Be aware that when standing at work with no steps - fitbit is giving you a rate of burn equal to sleeping - which is obviously not true - so you got that underestimating go on.

    And that adjustment even being set to Lightly-Active sounds about right.

    You may be able to improve it by confirming walking a known distance has Fitbit with that correct distance.
    Make it about 2 mph though, so Fitbit can dynamically adjust distance down to shuffle steps, or up to exercise pace.
    So stride length could be a benefit as your days may be very different.

    Might shorten the amount of experiment time, or at least smaller correction needed.

    And you can set your AL to Sedentary for that matter - you seem to have a handle on about total calorie burn to plan accordingly, and eat more or less in evening depending on what needs to happen.

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