Activity level if working desk job?

carofdiego

For those of you who work desk jobs and exercise regularly, what activity level do you choose on the Guided Setup? These are the options they give:

Sedentary: Spend most of the day sitting (e.g. bank teller, desk job)
Lightly Active: Spend a good part of the day on your feet (e.g. teacher, salesperson)
Active: Spend a good part of the day doing some physical activity (e.g. food server, postal carrier)
Very Active: Spend most of the day doing heavy physical activity (e.g. bike messenger, carpenter)

I work an office job and try to get up and move around when I remember to, and I also do intense exercise about 4 days a week (HIIT, weight, parkour). Not sure which option to choose if I'm going from sedentary in the day to active starting in the late afternoon. For now I'm choosing active.

MikePTY

Your activity level does not include exercise. That is seperate. You are supposed to log that seperstely and eat back the calories you burn on the days you do exercise.

I have a desk job, and I choose lightly active because I usually get at least 5000 steps of non exercise activity a day.

Machka9

You're sedentary.

Add the exercise in separately.

sijomial

A desk job doesn't automatically mean a sedentary lifestyle, that's too simplistic - your job is just part (a major part if working full time) of your overall activity level.

I was easily in the Lightly Activity category with a full time desk job due to the amount of movement/activity I built into a typical working day plus evenings and weekends. You will have to judge for yourself but a pedometer/step counting app might give you a rough idea. A typical desk working day for me was 6,000 steps for example.

Your exercise is absolutely nothing to do with your activity setting on MyFitnessPal. Otherwise if you included exercise in your acivity setting and then logged it after the event with those calories added to that day's allowance you would be double counting.

butterfly_2019

I was thinking the same actually - I have a desk job but do between 11k - 13k steps per day and this comes from the 45 minute walk to school/work in the mornings and a 30 minute walk home in the evenings plus any movement I do during my work day.

I put I was Lightly Active - is this OK? This gave me a 1520 calorie goal (35yrs, 5ft3in, 12st 2lb)

nighthawk584

butterfly_2019 wrote: »

I was thinking the same actually - I have a desk job but do between 11k - 13k steps per day and this comes from the 45 minute walk to school/work in the mornings and a 30 minute walk home in the evenings plus any movement I do during my work day.

I put I was Lightly Active - is this OK? This gave me a 1520 calorie goal (35yrs, 5ft3in, 12st 2lb)

Yes, lightly active would be ok. Try that setting for a few weeks and see how your progress is going and adjust from there. Also, add in any purposeful exercise you do

MikePTY

butterfly_2019 wrote: »

I was thinking the same actually - I have a desk job but do between 11k - 13k steps per day and this comes from the 45 minute walk to school/work in the mornings and a 30 minute walk home in the evenings plus any movement I do during my work day.

I put I was Lightly Active - is this OK? This gave me a 1520 calorie goal (35yrs, 5ft3in, 12st 2lb)

If you do over 10k steps a day, you likely fall in the active category.

sijomial

butterfly_2019 wrote: »

I was thinking the same actually - I have a desk job but do between 11k - 13k steps per day and this comes from the 45 minute walk to school/work in the mornings and a 30 minute walk home in the evenings plus any movement I do during my work day.

I put I was Lightly Active - is this OK? This gave me a 1520 calorie goal (35yrs, 5ft3in, 12st 2lb)

That's most probably too low a setting but as pointed out it's a start point - from which you can adjust based on your actual weight loss (and energy levels) over an extended period of time.

pinuplove

I'm at an office job, lightly active at a minimum and closer to active. I wish MFP would take that out of the description. Most people who work an office job are still more than sedentary.

cmriverside

I don't even work, live in a tiny condo with very little daily necessary activity. I am set at Active. Don't know why, but that's the calorie level I need to maintain my weight. I found the levels to be way too low. If I used Sedentary (which I basically am sedentary by the description) I would be given 500 calories less.

Bottom line for everyone is: log carefully, learn how to log food accurately and then run that experiment on how much YOU really need. Give it 4-6 weeks of data collection to get good trending data.

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/1234699/logging-accurately-step-by-step-guide/p1

carofdiego

Thanks all, this gives me an idea of a starting point.

and @cmriverside, I completely agree with you! If I put sedentary, I find the calorie suggestion too low, even if I'm accounting for exercise. I get verrrry hungry and tired and then I can't sleep at night because I haven't eaten enough. But I'll keep playing around with the options.

cwolfman13

carofdiego wrote: »

For those of you who work desk jobs and exercise regularly, what activity level do you choose on the Guided Setup? These are the options they give:

Sedentary: Spend most of the day sitting (e.g. bank teller, desk job)
Lightly Active: Spend a good part of the day on your feet (e.g. teacher, salesperson)
Active: Spend a good part of the day doing some physical activity (e.g. food server, postal carrier)
Very Active: Spend most of the day doing heavy physical activity (e.g. bike messenger, carpenter)

I work an office job and try to get up and move around when I remember to, and I also do intense exercise about 4 days a week (HIIT, weight, parkour). Not sure which option to choose if I'm going from sedentary in the day to active starting in the late afternoon. For now I'm choosing active.

With MFP your activity level doesn't include purposeful exercise. You log it after the fact and get additional calories to account for that activity. It's something you'll likely have to play with. When I was losing weight I had initially set it to sedentary because I have a desk job but I was losing faster than expected. I was more lightly active because I do get up and down and move around quite a bit at the office, plus at the time I had a 2 year old and new born at home and there wasn't much just sittin' around chillin' once I got home from the office.

hesn92

I found that the calories MFP gives me are a little too low. I work a desk job as well and I'm really not very active outside of exercise, depending on the time of year. But when I set my activity level to sedentary, I lose weight faster than what I should. So I always set mine to lightly active and it works out well for me, but YMMV.

allother94

Do you spend most of you time sitting at a desk? If so, you should choose the option “spends most of the day sitting at the desk”.

westrich20940

It honestly just matters what you find easiest/less confusing.

I initially used the guided set up on MFP (which uses NEAT to calculate your calorie goal). I have my activity level set to 'sedentary' because outside of my intentional exercise (running, hiking, walking, rock climbing) I am sedentary. Mostly at my job I might do 1-2000 steps a day, often less than that. At home I am on my couch usually too....so.

Even when I switched to calculating my calorie goal via TDEE...I still used 'sedentary' as my activity level just bc mentally for me it was easier to manually set my calorie goal on MFP to that (sedentary TDEE) and then still log my runs/hikes) and eat back some amount of those calories depending on my goal of either maintaining or losing weight.

wunderkindking

sijomial wrote: »

A desk job doesn't automatically mean a sedentary lifestyle, that's too simplistic - your job is just part (a major part if working full time) of your overall activity level.

I was easily in the Lightly Activity category with a full time desk job due to the amount of movement/activity I built into a typical working day plus evenings and weekends. You will have to judge for yourself but a pedometer/step counting app might give you a rough idea. A typical desk working day for me was 6,000 steps for example.

Your exercise is absolutely nothing to do with your activity setting on MyFitnessPal. Otherwise if you included exercise in your acivity setting and then logged it after the event with those calories added to that day's allowance you would be double counting.

This, this, this.

I work at a desk, at home. However, there are CONSISTENT daily parts of my life that move my activity level up. I live three flights of stairs from the street, another flight to my porch, and one more from living room to bathroom/kitchen in my house (and my desk is downstairs). I own 5 high energy herding breeds with exercise needs. I train my dogs and other people's dogs - shorter session daily, longer ones multiple times a week. ,

You combine all of that with 'to and from the car' 'carrying groceries' 'in and out of the house 4-5 times a day' and even just 'the walk to go pee' and I'm far surpassing the threshold of sedentary. None of what I do is 'exercise' or, honestly, particularly loggable - I log trail runs, longer or unusual hikes, paddleboarding, horseback riding, or whatever other above and beyond thing I do - but my LIFE is not really possible to log - how does one log '15 minutes of running from a dog in 35 second intervals to make them come to you' or 'sprinted 30 seconds of an agility course 3 times', or 'got the mail, did 5 flights of stairs at a jog' or- whatever? Maybe with a fitness tracker, but I don't have one of those and it's pain.

But it ain't sedentary, regardless of my day job being in front of a computer.

heybales

It was very interesting to be on MFP when Fitbit and later Garmin started being able to sync daily burn figures in.

So many people that had Sedentary selected started getting decent sized positive adjustments - 200-300 more, and couldn't believe it.

Until they actually described their evenings outside of exercise rushing around in limited time taking care of household/family duties. And then their weekends, still busy and active.
The distance moved and step counts (around 3-5K) that started moving them out of sedentary wasn't that low.

Yeah - it's a poor description when there are easily another 40 hrs in the week not at work.

Only if you were like triathlon training for massive hours daily outside work, with those hours obviously being counted in the exercise logged, and you didn't take care of much else because of loving family support, or you had nothing to take care of.

sijomial

@ValerieMorenoFGUn

Did you pick up that your gym visits are absolutely no part of your activity setting if using MFP as designed?

yirara

@antoniacassti This is an old ghost thread and the person you reply to might not be here anymore. MFP works differently than other websites: activity level is the activity you do day to day without exercise. If you sit all day and you don't do lots of house chores you're likely sendentary. But exercises are logged separately and give more calories to eat back.

cmriverside

@yirara

Hi, Sheepie. I think that antonia only came on here to advertise his/her money making scheme. Just a guess...

yirara

cmriverside wrote: »

@yirara

Hi, Sheepie. I think that antonia only came on here to advertise his/her money making scheme. Just a guess...

They edited their comment after I replied. Reported as well.