What exercise level am I?

lilac9

I'm trying to figure out how many calories I should be eating a day (I might try to lose weight so i might cut them by 500 a day) and I need to choose if I'm sedentary, light activity, moderate, or high activity. I go to school, then to softball practice so that takes my day from about 7am-5:30 or 6pm. So right now the exercise i do is softball, lifting 2x a week, and a 30 min. sports game with kids each day. But I'm starting to do cardio for one hour a day, whether its jumping rope, hula hooping, or zumba. and i dont plan on re-eating the calories from that cardio. So should i add that as a lifestyle thing? What activity level would you categorize me in? also i dont want to under-eat because i would like the energy for my sports and stuff. So yea, what level? Thanks

iLoveMyPitbull1225

I would put you as active.

lilac9

light, moderate, or highly active?

1holegrouper

if I understand MFP correctly by stating something other than sedentary you are then in essence pre-loading calories you need for your activity levels. What I do is set mine to sedentary then manually load all exercise so that the numbers are more precise. Any non-sedentary activity I do that is not recorded as a workout I view as 'extra credit'.

I also think that if you live an active lifestyle where you are on your feet alot other than during your planned workouts that bumping up your activity level would be important. Eating below a healthy calorie deficit can be just as bad or even worse than overeating your calories. This would keep you from needing to to manually enter a lot of activities (like putting out brother to brother fights, etc. I think that's why my mom was always so slim when I was growing up, lol) and MFP may not actually have all of them on their list.

Greenrun99

moderate, if you add cardio for 1 hour a day and its nonstop or pretty close to it then highly active..