Help with activity level

Meganalva

I've been on this site for about 1 1/2 months & have struggled with choosing the correct activity level. I'm just not sure if I have the right one selected. I will tell you what a normal day for me is like if you could please give me your opinion. I have had 'lightly active' selected until tonight, I switched it to 'active'.

The weird thing is that I started at this site at 139 lbs, once I lost 7 lbs, I went in to "update your diet & fitness profile' just to browse & see if I wanted to change anything. Well, I didn't, but clicked 'save' anyway....it then dropped my calories for the day to 50 less! Ugh. Is that normal??? I'm confused.

Okay so I work full-time as a cashier in a pharmacy so I do alot of turning, a little light walking to & from to get prescriptions, bending, alot of hand & arm motion & A TON of standing throughout the week. I also have 2 young boys who have me up at 6am starting my day & don't go to bed until 8pm. So I don't sit very much. Would this be considered 'lightly active' or 'active' in your opinion??? Of course, add in the housework & such. haha!

Thank you for your help!!

ChubbieTubbie

I'd consider that lightly active. Mostly because it's not work I'd consider 'active' work like construction or something of that sort. As for taking care of kids, I read once that a lot of moms overjudge their activity levels but they're not as active at home as they think they are. I'm not sure I agree with that, but better safe than sorry--I'd rather underestimate my activity level and have less calories per day than overestimate and not have a big enough difference to lose as much weight, if that makes sense.
Your calories probably changed when you went in to look and didn't change anything because as you lose weight your calorie needs change as well, and it may not have been updated since you hit a certain weight in your weight loss journey.

Meganalva

bump

Kate_UK

I'd say lightly active too. I work 3 days much of that on my feet , and have a toddler to run around after when I'm at home and I have mine set to sedantry. Thats is because when I put lighly active in MFP gave me nearly 1600 cals, which I thought was way too much. The sed setting gives me 1430 which I'm more comfortable with.

As you loose weight MFP adjusts your cals so that you continue loosing at 1lb a week (or what ever level you have chosen) As we loose weight the body needs less calories to do the day to day stuff so if we didn't reduce them accordingly our loss would slow or even stop.

Good luck!

PJilly

I'll be the first one here to vote for "active." I think the tendency for most people is to err on the side of eating fewer calories than necessary, but I'm from the school of thought that says you should eat the most you can while still losing fat. Try it for a while, track and stick to your calories diligently, and if that works, why eat fewer calories than you have to?

Meganalva

Thanks for your opinions! Greatly appreciated. I agree, PJilly! lol

Yeah I set it back to lightly active for now & if I'm losing MORE than 1lb a week, I'll up it to active. At first I was losing 2 lbs a week but I think that might have only been because I stopped drinking so many calories & eating so much candy! hahaha