Question about activity levels

HannahRoo

50% of the time I sit at my desk at work all day and 50% of the time I would be in the lightly active to active range (standing up all day or even walking around most of the time). I keep myself permanently on the sedentary setting, but am concerned that I'm selling myself short on calories. Should I vary the settings from day to day instead?

jensocalgirl

I wouldn't. I'm in the same boat as you when it comes to work but I keep it at my same level. As a rule of thumb I never count my work as my workout - even if I climb up and down the stairs to my office 5 times. I think it all balances out because there are the days I don't leave my chair.

pkgirrl

When I work, 3-4 times per week, I bike about 30km there and back, and work about 8 hours doing an extremely physical job ( mainly landscaping at a garage, but I do some car repairs as well) I do change my physical activity levels, because when I don't work, I'll probably run if I don't have soccer, but I log those as exercise instead. I find Extremely active to sedentary only gives me a 150cal difference anyways, so which ever way you go, I don't think it'll make too much difference.

MacMadame

I figured out what calorie level I need to eat to lose .5 a pound a week and I set all my MFP settings to come out to that number. :happy:

I figured it out per week and then divided everything by 7. That's because I found that on my really big workout days, I'm slightly hungrier than normal, but the next day I'm also hungrier than normal even if I don't work out as much. So having one calorie goal for every day and making minor adjustments works for me.