Correct Activity Levels?

djicon

I've been using MFP for over a year now and it's really helped me achieve my fitness goals. I keep a food diary not to lose weight, but to eat enough calories to sustain the level of exercise I do each day. I'm still unclear of how many net calories I should be intaking per day after exercise is calculated because none of the descriptions for my "normal daily activities" in the goal settings apply to me. The options are:

Sedentary: Spend most of the day sitting (e.g. bank teller, desk job)
Lightly Active: Spend a good part of the day on your feet (e.g. teacher, salesman)
Active: Spend a good part of the day doing some physical activity (e.g. waitress, mailman)
Very Active: Spend most of the day doing heavy physical activity (e.g. bike messenger, carpenter)

I have a desk job but I exercise vigorously 5-6 times a week (running, circuit training, yoga, swimming). i'm also currently training for a half marathon and running long distances once a week and normally track over 10K steps on my Fitbit everyday. I don't feel like "sedentary" applies to me because that insinuates someone who sits most the day and rarely exercises. However, "lightly active" doesn't seem like it applies to me either, because I don't spend a good part of the day on my feet; I would say 1.5 hours of walking and 1 hour of exercising daily. I looked at other calorie tracker websites and some of those seem to think that I am in the "active" category. I need to know which category best describes me so that I can figure out an accurate daily caloric intake.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

TrishasTime

Hi

I see that you right on top of managing your calorie intake and that you know MFP has 2 distinct questions to help your net calories

1) How do you spend your day (which I take to mean work )

2) How many times do you intend to work out / time.

From your description, I would say you are lightly active (taking into account that 10,000 steps in the minimum recommend for healthy living)

I would suggest that you check the section about how many times your work out - and make sure that is correct and once that is okay - that would be your net.

This data can be found under the home tab >goals

Hope this helps

trish:)

PurpleTina

I set mine according to my 'normal' daily activity level, the exercise is a separate thing.

jaz050465

I think that's the way it's designed. Put in your general activity level and then manually add in your exercise in addition, either using the drop down menu or data from a HRM.

tabi26

Do a google search for "TDEE calculator". Plug in your numbers and it'll tell you how many you should be eating. Try a few different calculators, lots of people like the "scooby" one.

DavPul

Sedentary. It's just the name of a setting to get your basic calorie level correct, not a judgement about your life. It doesn't matter if you climb mountains 6x per week or run a 10k every other day. Those activities are accounted for separately. Set it for sedentary.