Not Active or lightly active?

balllorraine66

Can anyone help me understand this please? Are we talking activity levels before exercise or to include exercise? Before exercise, I do roughly six thousand steps during the course of the day. Does this fall into the inactive or lightly active category? Just a little confused and would appreciate some clarity please. Thank you 🙏🏾

AnnPT77

I'll try to help.

There are two different ways to do this, either one of which can work. Think of it as two different accounting methods.

1. Set your activity level to your best estimate, including the average amount of exercise you do - averaged over a typical week. Eat close to that recommended calorie intake every day. For sure, do the planned exercise - so don't include a too-rosy optimistic exercise plan in your activity level. Be realistic.
2. Set your activity level based on your non-exercise activity, like your job, home chores, non-exercise hobbies, and that sort of thing. Again, think in terms of averages over a week. On a day with no exercise, eat that recommended number of calories. On a day with exercise, carefully and realistically estimate the exercise calories, log the exercise, and eat those calories back, too, on top of the base calories. It's OK to "bank" some of the exercise calories for sometime in the next day or few, if you prefer.

Either one of those should lead to about the same results. A couple of other things:

• If you sync a fitness tracker to MFP, wear the tracker as close to 24 x 7 as possible, and you're close to the average person in your overall calorie needs, MFP and the tracker will take care of the arithmetic and uncertainty factor for you, as long as you turn on negative adjustments in MFP. (That setting, when turned on, will let MFP deduct calories from your goal if you have a very inactive day, well below normal. On average or more active days, you'll have calories added to your calorie goal.) Note: The number of calories added isn't exactly exercise calories, so it won't match. By the end of the day, it's working off all-day, all-source calories the tracker estimates you burned. Simple example: If you do an ultra-hard workout of 500 exercise calories, then drag through the rest of the day because of fatigue, you won't get 500 calories added. In effect, the exercise may've burned the 500, but the dragging through the day caused lower than usual calorie burn through fatigue for the rest of the day, effectively wiping out part of the exercise calorie burn. Yes, that's a real thing: Energy compensation, a.k.a calorie compensation.
• MFP, outside calorie calculators, even fitness trackers: All of them give you estimates, basically the calorie burn that would be average for someone who shares the same small number of demographic details you told the thing. Most people are close to average (by definition), but a few will be noticeably higher or lower, and a rare few surprisingly fat off. No matter how you estimate, follow the calorie recommendation fairly closely for 4-6 weeks - whole menstrual cycle for people who have those - then compare targeted weight loss to actual average weekly loss over that whole time. If necessary, adjust calorie goal based on those results, assuming 500 calories a day is a pound a week, 1100 calories a day is a kg a week. (Use arithmetic for partial pounds/kilos.)

Steps is an imperfect correlate of activity level, because other types of movement count, too. But most people here seem to find that the boundary between sedentary/not very active is somewhere around 5000 steps, plus or minus maybe 1000. If you do the 4-6 week/one menstrual cycle experiment mentioned above, that will sort itself out for you in a personalized way. For now, just make your best guess, and start in on that test drive.

Best wishes for success - IME the quality of life improvement is more than worth the effort invested!