Activity level

pgaron1

I have been on FP for years on and off. I used to say lightly active to have less calories in the bank but then I would add up the calories burned while exercising.
Now I’ve read a lot about macro nutrients. I play tennis pretty much everyday singles or doubles for 90 min and then I’m getting back i to strength training at least 3 times a week. I would love to lose 10 lbs but more importantly tone up and build muscles. Is it better to increase my activity level in my profile and not add extra calories from exercise to ensure I have the right amount of macros? Hopefully that makes sense! The suggested calories ranges from 1200 to 1500. Advice welcomed!

tomcustombuilder

Do any of the above and review progress or lack of it in 4-6 weeks. There are too many variables in these equations to give an accurate answer.

Retroguy2000

As the Rock says, it doesn't matter. Exercise estimates may be off, in practice you maybe shouldn't eat back all the calories from intense exercise because your NEAT may go down while you recover, etc.

Track your calories in diligently. If your exercise is consistent and you maintain weight at X calories, then that's your TDEE. Drop 500 calories from there, that's one pound per week weight loss.

AnnPT77

pgaron1 wrote: »

I have been on FP for years on and off. I used to say lightly active to have less calories in the bank but then I would add up the calories burned while exercising.
Now I’ve read a lot about macro nutrients. I play tennis pretty much everyday singles or doubles for 90 min and then I’m getting back i to strength training at least 3 times a week. I would love to lose 10 lbs but more importantly tone up and build muscles. Is it better to increase my activity level in my profile and not add extra calories from exercise to ensure I have the right amount of macros? Hopefully that makes sense! The suggested calories ranges from 1200 to 1500. Advice welcomed!

Increasing activity level to a setting that reflects averaged-in exercise (to eat the same number of calories every day) or logging exercise when we do it (so eating more on some days than others depending on exercise load) ought to take us to approximately the same calorie level either way, once averaged over multiple days . . . and averaging over multiple days is exactly what our bodies do. MFP resets at midnight; bodies don't.

In other words, doing one versus the other is personal preference. (I add exercise calories when I exercise . . . and I do care about macros, too.)

The one caveat of using activity level to get constant daily calories is that MFP's activity level setting is designed to reflect daily life activity, not including exercise. If I were wanting to have the same calorie budget every day, I'd get an estimate from a real TDEE calculator designed for that, such as this one:

https://www.sailrabbit.com/bmr/

I like that one because it has more activity levels than most; the activity levels have clearer descriptions; and it lets a person compare multiple research-based estimating formulas. (That does make the user interface look a little scary at first, but it's easy to step through and get estimates.)

With an estimate from an outside TDEE calculator like that, you set your calories in MFP manually, subtracting calories for a deficit. Under the covers, MFP uses different activity level multipliers than a TDEE calculator, and it doesn't offer many levels of granularity.

Here's a thing that concerns me about your post: You're quite active, it sounds like, and you don't have much weight to lose (10 pounds), plus you say it's more important to you to tone up and build muscle. To me that suggests that a very small calorie deficit (slow loss) would be the best way to balance those goals. I'd suggest half a pound a week loss rate at most, which is a 250 calorie daily deficit.

Slow loss is a better plan when we have relatively little weight to lose (because we can only metabolize a certain amount of body fat daily per pound we have on our body, after which muscle loss becomes more possible). Also, a small calorie deficit increases the chance of fitness gains, strength gains specifically. Chances of muscle mass gain are iffy in any calorie deficit, but they're worse in a big deficit, less bad in a small one.

However, you say the suggested calories range from 1200 to 1500. That's surprisingly low, and makes me wonder if you're selecting an aggressive loss rate, like 2 pounds a week. If so, that's not a great way to support your specific situation and goals, IMO. 1200 calories for weight loss is the minimum MFP will give any woman. It's really typically only a suitable calorie level for a woman who is quite petite, mostly sedentary, and non-young. Now, maybe you are petite and non-young, but you're far from sedentary (once the exercise is in the mix).

I'm saying this from the perspective of a woman myself, one who is 5'5", 132 pounds this morning, age 68, active. When I was obese to overweight at age 59-60, I could eat more than that and lose weight at a decent rate. Now, I'd still lose too fast for my own good at 1500 gross calories. I admit I'm a mysteriously good li'l ol' calorie burner for some reason, and one person's experience doesn't tell us much about what will happen to another, so maybe I'm over-reacting. But 1200-1500 calories sounds pretty low for an active woman with so little weight to lose.

Here's a thing I also don't understand: You say awareness of macros is leading you to consider eating the same number of calories every day. But when you log exercise separately, MFP also adds to your macros, not just to your calories, so you should still end up in about the same place either way. For myself, I have a gram minimum for both protein and fats that I hit whether it's an exercise day or not. I log exercise separately, and am pretty active. On exercise days, with more calories in play, I may eat more than my minimum protein or fats or both (because it's fine to go over), or just eat more carbs up to my calorie goal. So I don't really understand about macros as a reason to go to fixed daily calories. (I admit, this could be my cognitive problem, not something odd about your intentions! ).

As a side comment, Retro up-thread warns about adding the calories from intense exercise, because intense exercise can reduce NEAT. It can, but I think he worries too much about this.

What I think is really true is that doing exercise we're not conditioned enough for (whether cardiovascular (CV) or strength exercise or both) can lead to fatigue that reduces NEAT. It's overdoing for current fitness level that reduces NEAT, not necessarily any particular objective intensity of exercise. What matters is the totality of exercise load (CV and strength, plus the duration, frequency, intensity and specific modalities) and how that load relates to our current level of fitness. Take it too far as a totality, fatigue happens, and NEAT can suffer.

Example: You're playing tennis for around 90 minutes pretty much every day. If you've been doing that for quite some time, I suspect that that may not be especially fatiguing for you.
There are other people - less fit people, people new to playing tennis - for whom playing tennis three times a week for an hour would be completely exhausting, and cause fatigue that left them dragging through the week. For those people, they won't get all the calorie benefit of the exercise, because of the fatigue/dragging.

There's no reason to fear objectively higher-intensity exercise that you're reasonably well conditioned to. Intense exercise requires fuel! I think better advice is not to over-do, watch out for under-recovery and fatigue. Gradual increase in total exercise load is sensible, from a calorie burn perspective (and also a fitness improvement perspective!).

Bottom line, I think whether you choose to eat the same number of calories every day, or eat more on exercise days than on non-exercise days, everything can work out fine for either weight management or macros. Either way, eat enough calories to fuel your activity without causing counter-productive fatigue, eat slightly fewer calories than you burn in total for weight loss, and eat at least the minimum macros you need for best nutrition.

I hope that makes sense. (Apologies for the stupid-long essay. :flowerforyou: I'm like that. )

Best wishes!