Activity level for 10,000 steps a day?

Kittyy1994

Hi there I go for a walk both before and after work and average around 10,000 steps a day. Otherwise I am office based during the week. What activity level should I use? I don’t have a fit bit or anythinf to know how much I am burning so an approximate activity level compared with other similar people would be good.
I am female, 168cm and 63kg if that helps

Speckle38

I am similar height, weight and activity level. I have mine set to lightly active. On my non-working days, I easily double my step count.

deannalfisher

10000 steps is active - normally 0-5000 sedentary; 5000-8500 lightly active and 8500+ active

cwolfman13

deannalfisher wrote: »

10000 steps is active - normally 0-5000 sedentary; 5000-8500 lightly active and 8500+ active

scarlett_k

If I put myself as active based on my steps I would gain weight. I average 15k a day and I'm supposedly lightly active despite not feeling it! Been doing this 3 years and at this point I'm 100% confident it's not a massive margin of error in my food logging. It's not a hard and fast rule, just experiment, pick a level and use it as a guide for 6 weeks or so and see what works for you.

cwolfman13

scarlett_k wrote: »

If I put myself as active based on my steps I would gain weight. I average 15k a day and I'm supposedly lightly active despite not feeling it! Been doing this 3 years and at this point I'm 100% confident it's not a massive margin of error in my food logging. It's not a hard and fast rule, just experiment, pick a level and use it as a guide for 6 weeks or so and see what works for you.

That's the equivalent of walking around 7.5 miles per day on top of everything else you do...how would you think that is light active? Lol...

I work a desk job and am lucky to get around 6K steps and I'm easily light active vs sedentary, even on non-exercise days.

Duck_Puddle

Are you logging the walks you do before and after work as exercise?

If so, how many of your steps come from those walks?

Your mfp activity setting should be what you do not including anything you log as exercise. That may not match your overall activity level.

For example-I average 12k steps a day. That’s active. 9k of those steps come from my runs which are logged as exercise. I only take about 3k steps a day not including exercise (I work a desk job at home). So while I am quite active overall, my mfp activity setting is sedentary (because it’s based on whatever I do that isn’t logged as exercise).

If you’re not logging your walks as exercise, ignore this and go by the total step counts given above.

cmriverside

welllllll as you can see we are all over the place on answers.


I am retired and live in a tiny condo so not a lot of chores. Most days I get around 10,000 steps including a walk around the neighborhood with a few hills. I am eating at the Active level and that's about right.


I think you'll have to experiment a bit. There are many factors, not the least of which is - how accurately are you logging your food and other intentional exercise? There are errors we all make and you'll have to come up with your own calories by tracking for a couple months. It's the only way.

PAV8888

10K steps, for people who are not outliers, and who log their food fairly accurately, and who are not separately logging an additional exercise that includes some of these steps, will translate into an activity level of active, corresponding to an activity factor of 1.6 as defined by MFP.

Assuming your pick a reasonable deficit goal for your situation, and log fairly consistently, you can then in 4 to 6 weeks compare your expected results based on your paper deficit to how your weight trend changed, and adjust your goals based on that.

If most of your steps are based on deliberate activity (though personally I would not fully discount the extra daily living steps that you may be accumulating) there exist numerous smartphone apps that could capture them, including the freely available pacer and Fitbit apps.

Unless I'm mistaken you're within the normal weight range, so it is entirely likely that you should be choosing a 250 to 500 calorie deficit at most, which in turn means that progress may be slow and lost in normal water weight fluctuations, which is where weight trend apps such as Libra, happy scale, or trendweight/weightgrapher come into play

nicsflyingcircus

I have my MFP set to active and I tip over from negative calorie adjustments at about 7500 steps, give or take. 10k steps starts pushing me into a small positive calorie adjustment.

Garmin is trying to tell me that my TDEE (40yo female, 5'9", 276.4lbs) is about 3200 with an average daily step count of 11,067. That matches with Sailrabbit's moderately active modifier, which I don't necessarily feel I meet, though I also stand for about 10hrs a day, three days a week, while at my job.

I am keeping an eye on my calories in VS weightloss for a bit to see if it's accurate for me.