Which Activity Level to Select??

hertsgirl1984

I'm 5ft 7, 221lbs, 40ish %BF, 29 and a woman. I work out twice a day and total a calorie burn of about 1500.
My question is, to lose weight, which activity level should I select, to know how many calories to eat? Then once I know, do I theb eat my exercise calories back?

Thanks

sijomial

Following the MFP "eat back exercise calories" method your exercise isn't part of your activity level. Otherwise you would be counting it twice.
Your activity level reflects your job, lifestyle and day to day activity.

It's often confusing because people look at TDEE calculators where exercise is part of the calculation (but you wouldn't then get more calories added for exercise).

marissanik

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/1080242-a-guide-to-get-you-started-on-your-path-to-sexypants

Try reading that as a guide. The majority of people that I have spoken to on this site seem to NOT use mfp default settings. Mine are custom.

Francl27

How do you burn 1500 calories a day? Where do you get those numbers? It sounds excessive.

hertsgirl1984

I workout for 3 hours a day, which burns around 1500 calories. I wear a HRM monitor, so I've got a pretty good idea of what I'm burning.

LAT1963

I'm guessing you mean an activity monitor rather than a heart rate monitor. HRM's tend to be read-off while exercising to tell whether your intensity is in an optimal range.

There's different components to how many calories your body burns in a day.

First, basal metabolic rate (BMR). This is what you would burn in a coma, with no activity.

Then, the mfp activity-based targets. The MFP target is your BMR plus what you burn incidental to your activities of daily living (aside: healthcare folks abbreviate this as "ADL's"). Getting out of bed, walking around the house, basic shopping--things that you do just to survive fall into this category. If you have a desk job, mfp considers you sedentary. If you walk around a bit, making presentations (their example is "teacher"), then you are at the next level up in activity. If you were a lumberjack you'd be at the highest activity level.

"Exercise" is anything that you add on deliberately to your ADL's for the purpose of losing weight or building muscle--or fun activities that you don't or can't do every day but that add to your normal background of activity. If you are on the corporate softball team, you probably are doing that for social reasons not just for exercise, but it counts as exercise because it's not something that you do routinely on an almost daily basis. Likewise taking your pet or your kids to the beach.

Some things can be covered either as your baseline mfp target or as exercise. If you always walk your dog the same route, you could consider yourself to be a more active mfp category to cover that, or you could stay at a less active category and log it as exercise (the more popular way to do it).

If you wear an activity monitor 24/7--that tells you *all* the calories you burned, in *every* category. So you don't need to track exercise separately. The number it gives you is the number to hit if you want your weight to stay constant. If you want to lose weight, eat fewer calories than the activity monitor reports. If you over-eat your allotment (as with other forms of tracking), you can zero that out by exercising more before the end of your day.