TDEE Approach for People with Varied Activity Levels?

Ploogy

The nature of my work requires that I have very varying activity levels. I am primarily at a desk job, but some days to much more walking than others. This also leads me to be able to work out every other day, or two days in a row with a gap, and so on... Are there folks out there with a similar situation, and how do you apply the TDEE-20% approach?

I ask because this approach bakes in an activity level. One thought is to set TDEE for sedentary and eat back any exercise calories, but I'm worried that may foul up the system. Does this work?

Gapwedge01

The nature of my work requires that I have very varying activity levels. I am primarily at a desk job, but some days to much more walking than others. This also leads me to be able to work out every other day, or two days in a row with a gap, and so on... Are there folks out there with a similar situation, and how do you apply the TDEE-20% approach?

I ask because this approach bakes in an activity level. One thought is to set TDEE for sedentary and eat back any exercise calories, but I'm worried that may foul up the system. Does this work?

Yes, that could work. But the best way IMHO would be to choose at least Lightly Active then eat 200 more calories on days you exert more energy from exercise at that level and back off a 100 on days you don't.

Flowers4Julia

Well, the TDEE spreadsheet I use assumes sedentary but then lets you add in minutes per week that you do of varying levels of other activities, like slow walking, heavier aerobics, weight lifting etc. So, then it averages all that it using an "activity multiplier". I find it way more accurate than a heart rate monitor which can only help you with the heavier aerobic activity.

Search the forums for the "Spreadsheet" and you should come up with the "in place of a road map" group. Look in the stickies....

here is the link to the spreadsheet directly:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Amt7QBR9-c6MdGVTbGswLUUzUHNVVUlNSW9wZWloeUE

Ploogy

This is fantastic! Thank you. I am going to go through the spreadsheet in detail.