Sedendary or lightly active?

jents4

I'm a mom of 2 little ones. I do sit a lot in the day playing with the kids on the floor, driving in the car etc. But I do take the one to preschool and bring my baby with me, go to the gym for at least an hour and drop off my baby at the daycare there about 3 times a week and I am up and down constantly all day. I'm not really sure what category I fit in?

Shuuma

I would say lightly active. There's not much time for sedentary with two little ones! I have a desk job, so I chose sedentary.

cwolfman13

I have a desk job but chase two little ones around when I'm not at work and do most of the cooking, etc around here...I set myself to lightly active when I was doing MFP to lose and lost 40 Lbs. Keep in mind with MFP you don't include your exercise as part of your activity level...you log it and get credit for it after the fact and eat those calories back (adjusted of course for estimation error...most people vastly overestimate their exercise burn).

In reality, most people aren't truly sedentary...maybe an average of sedentary or light active, but few people are actually sedentary.

jents4

Thank u for responding! I had it at sedentary and felt like I was starving myself, thought maybe it was because I was eating to little.

Shuuma

If it's any consolation, when I first started my workout and 1200 calorie days, I thought I was starving, too. When I started putting all my meals and snacks into MFP in the morning and just eating what I had planned, I found out I was making myself eat because I wasn't as hungry as I thought. Not eating is technically starving. Eating more with better calorie choices made a HUGE difference.

After two weeks of working out and eating every few hours, I suddenly went from eating because I thought I needed to, to feeling hungry in my muscles. It was very cool.

Hang in there, momma!

cmriverside

I would use Lightly Active, maybe even the next bump up, whatever it is.


Are you breastfeeding? If so, add 500 calories a day just for that (you can enter it as an exercise OR just manually adjust your calorie goal.)

Also, with the amount of weight you have to lose - set your Goals to "Lose one pound per week". You don't have enough weight to lose to use the two pound per week setting.

Changing those two things (Activity and Goal) should give you 400 calories or so more to eat.

Cyclingbonnie

I myself would use sedentary, log your gym workouts and maybe wear a pedometer (so you can record your steps as an exercise). You then can eat back your calories when you earn more and you won't be overestimating what you will be burning.

Also while you are adjusting to the reduced calories you can choose to loose slower and that will raise you calorie intake. We often want to rush to the goal weight, but taking it slow is the better approach. I know it gets old, but always bears repeating ... we are not on a diet ... we are make a life style change.

ILiftHeavyAcrylics

Use lightly active. Then re-evaluate in 4 weeks and make changes if needed.