activity level - prior posts seem contradictory!

lar4290

I know that this topic has been covered countless times on the forums, but the more posts I read, the more confused I become because all the posts seem to say something different!

I'm wondering what activity level I should be, particularly because my activity levels vary a lot. A bit more: I walk a mile or two almost every day (I live in a city, and don't have a car. On nice days, I'll walk the 2 miles to work, otherwise is I take public transport, I'll walk about a mile roundtrip). I'm a professional, which means up to 60-75 hours a week at a desk or in meetings, sitting down. I try to get to the gym, but its hard to go everyday, especially because sometimes things come up for work. On average, I say I do a long walk (5 miles plus, two hours plus) one day a week, and 45-min workouts 2-3x (mostly cardio because of limited time, although I'll start doing weights because I know the benefits after I've lost about ten lbs (aka hit BMI 25, I'm at 27 now)).

Does this make me sedentary, lightly active, or somewhere in between that I should manually program?

Pebble321

You just have to pick one and try it out - from your description I'd suggest lightly active to cover your daily walking to public transport etc and then you can add longer walks and other workouts on top of that.
Or choose active and only log extra-long workouts.
(Unlike other calorie calculators MFP doesn't include exercise in your daily calorie allowance, that's why you add and eat extra cals when you work out).

dansls1

The most accurate is to list as sedentary and then put all the walks in as exercise - but lightly active and only include the cardio would sound fair as well.

AthenaErr

I approach this with a bit of trial and error. Like you my activity level varies a fair bit day to day. I put myself in as sedentary and on days when I do more walking I log that if its 20-30mins or more. I dont log anything like cleaning tho - just the walking I do and actual exercise and I estimate my walking as slower than it probably is. I find this ok and not too hard to stick to - I increased my cals from about 1300? to 1500. The mfp calc says that on that I would lose 0.3 lbs a week. But I find I am averaging about a pound a week on a BMI of 25-26

lar4290

I've been on sedentary and add in walking if I do walk to work or take a long walk (I use a different site to calculate calories for that because this site's estimates seem really high). However, I was more curious if my BMR would be higher because I'm a lot more active than some people. I'm trying to avoid starvation mode, and have read recent posts that generally folks have activity levels/caloric intake on here that are lower than what they should. I have no idea about all of this....what my maintenance calories would be (I don't think a fitbit would be appropriate for me. I have a polar for my cardio workouts).

Pebble321

I don't think many people are truly sedentary - and if you don't drive a car then you are much more likely to be lighly active.
Don't stress too much about it, these numbers are all estimates, you need to try it out for a while and see what suits your body.