Started a waitressing job about 2 months ago..

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EmilyAnn89
EmilyAnn89 Posts: 564 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
I don't work every day. Anywhere between 3-5 days a week, and about 3-6 hours at a time. I work in a pretty busy restaurant and am usually walking 100% of the time. I don't want to change my lifestyle to lightly active because I don't work everyday, but should I? I wore a pedometer at work once and I walked 3.5 miles in 4 hours. I usually just put in that I walked 2.0 mph for half of the time that I worked. So if I worked 5 hours I would put that I walked for 2.5. I know this is probably so confusing, but does that sound about righ? Just wanted someone else's opinion. Thanks!

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  • karmah2771
    karmah2771 Posts: 42 Member
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    I would think that would qualify as light daily activity. But if you up your daily activity level you can't count the calories that you burn at the job as exercise as it's already been factored into your activity level.

    While you do burn calories walking at work it is tough to track a fair assessment of how many you burn without a heart rate monitor. You can walk a ton in a half hour and then have ten minutes of nothing. So it may be best just to up the daily activity level and just keep track of any exercise you engage in outside of work.
  • focus4fitness
    focus4fitness Posts: 551 Member
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    I used to wait tables and my trainer at the time told me not to change my activity and it did work well for me not to change it.
  • jesusHchris
    jesusHchris Posts: 1,405 Member
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    Once you are on this site a bit, logging calories and see your progress, you will set your own calorie goals and ignore that setting anyway. For example, you will notice that you maintain your weight at x amount of calories - then you set you daily goals accordingly. The MFP numbers are just estimations anyway.

    Oh, and good luck to you! :)
  • sherbear2678
    sherbear2678 Posts: 60 Member
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    hubby is a cook in the army and doesn't log anything he does at work even tho it's a 9-12 hour day for him, mostly on his feet in army boots... he just started using mfp (got him addicted to the iPhone app - who knew it would be that easy?? haha) and only puts in as exercise what he does outside of work... hope that helps!

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