Getting 20,000+ steps per day on holiday. Calorie adjustment?

purple4sure05

Hey guys! So I'm on holiday with my boyfriend. He has a fitbit but doesn't use MFP. We pretty much dont leave each others side so his fitbit will be in the relative ballpark of my activity for the day. Its logging 25k to 30k steps per day, and around 20 km per day. I'm usually sedentary outside of intentional exercise. Can someone provide me an estimate in any form of how many extra calories this would result in? I feel so hungry but I'm eating more than usual. I dont want to over or under compensate. If it helps I'm 5 ft 6 and 130 pounds.

GummiMundi

You can manually add walking to your intentional exercise here on MFP. Thing is, it's not measured by steps or distance, but rather by time and speed (fast, moderate, leisurely, etc.). So, you can estimate for how long you're walking, log that under "Exercise", and MFP will add those calories to your daily intake goal.

DX2JX2

You can assume that you burned your body weight in pounds X .32 per mile when walking. Assuming that 20K steps is about 10 miles, that would be about 400 extra calories.

MikePTY

I would adjust your calories in MFP to "very active". It would certainly give you more than 400 extra calories for that much walking.

MikePTY

DX2JX2 wrote: »

You can assume that you burned your body weight in pounds X .32 per mile when walking. Assuming that 20K steps is about 10 miles, that would be about 400 extra calories.

Where does this .3 per mile walking multiplier come from? I've seen it quoted as truth regularly on this forum but every other walking calorie estimator I find puts it at significantly higher.

firef1y72

purple4sure05 wrote: »

Hey guys! So I'm on holiday with my boyfriend. He has a fitbit but doesn't use MFP. We pretty much dont leave each others side so his fitbit will be in the relative ballpark of my activity for the day. Its logging 25k to 30k steps per day, and around 20 km per day. I'm usually sedentary outside of intentional exercise. Can someone provide me an estimate in any form of how many extra calories this would result in? I feel so hungry but I'm eating more than usual. I dont want to over or under compensate. If it helps I'm 5 ft 6 and 130 pounds.

I'm 148lb, walked 20000 steps yesterday (included a 1 mile run) and got an adjustment of 720 Calories. This was just general pootling around, no fast walking.

MikePTY

firef1y72 wrote: »

purple4sure05 wrote: »

Hey guys! So I'm on holiday with my boyfriend. He has a fitbit but doesn't use MFP. We pretty much dont leave each others side so his fitbit will be in the relative ballpark of my activity for the day. Its logging 25k to 30k steps per day, and around 20 km per day. I'm usually sedentary outside of intentional exercise. Can someone provide me an estimate in any form of how many extra calories this would result in? I feel so hungry but I'm eating more than usual. I dont want to over or under compensate. If it helps I'm 5 ft 6 and 130 pounds.

I'm 148lb, walked 20000 steps yesterday (included a 1 mile run) and got an adjustment of 720 Calories. This was just general pootling around, no fast walking.

The 700 calorie range seems about right for what I would give her as well.

DX2JX2

MikePTY wrote: »

DX2JX2 wrote: »

You can assume that you burned your body weight in pounds X .32 per mile when walking. Assuming that 20K steps is about 10 miles, that would be about 400 extra calories.

Where does this .3 per mile walking multiplier come from? I've seen it quoted as truth regularly on this forum but every other walking calorie estimator I find puts it at significantly higher.

Runner's World published an article on it a few years ago. It's easily findable via Google. Note that the 0.3 multiplier is the incremental burn rate only. It ignores calories that would have been burned regardless of physical activity during that time. Also note that this is for zero elevation change.

Based on my experience, the Runner's World figure is probably a little conservative but it's not too far off the mark. I would say that my burn rate aligns much closer to 0.3/mile for walking and 0.6/mile for running than it does to some of the higher figures from other calculators. That said, at the end of the day the overall difference in burn between calculators will be a couple of hundred calories, tops, for someone of average activity levels. A small enough variance to get lost in other factors or personal variability.