Activity level.

MikeyVinny

Since I've started MFP I've had my activity level set to lightly active. For the last few weeks I've been exercising 5x per week for a minimum of an hour. Should I change my settings to active? I'm confused because it ups my daily calorie intake for obvious reasons, so maybe I have been eating too far under my daily goal. (I'm usually well under my calorie goal by at least 600 after adding in my workout.). Any and all advice is helpful.

-Mike

psuLemon

First, you really don't want to be under your goal. Next, there are two ways to account for exercise; if you workout 5 days a week, you can set your account to moderate and not worry about exercise calories or you can set it based on your daily job and eat back exercise calories. It's person preference but I always include my exercise calories in my calculation and eat the same number every day.


Also, you don't want a huge deficit as it can increase the amount of muscle you lose.

tsareenaw

The activity levels should reflect what you do when you are not doing any specific workouts. If you were to increase your activity level to include these workouts then you shouldn't log them and mfp will assume you always have this level of activity.

The activity level is your start point, you need to look at things like your job and how much that involves. My activity level is set to sedentary. That's because I work in an office and sit at my desk for most of the day. I work out once or twice a day 6/7 days a week but this doesn't increase my activity level because I log each of the workouts. Because I have my activity set at sedentary it means that on a day when I don't do any exercise mfp has worked out the correct base calorie level for me.

I've just realised that is very long! Hope it makes sense!

MikeyVinny

Thanks for the input!