What should be activity setting be?

sunlover89

My day to day life is generally sitting, BUT I do cycle to the gym 15/20 minutes each way, do 40 minutes of heavy lifting followed by 20 minutes of HIIT on the treadmill, 4/5 days a week. Should I still have it set to sedentary?

smokinjackd

Depends if you are logging your workouts. I have a fitbit and because of it I have found I'm not as sedentary as I thought. Only you know if you just do your workout for the hour and then sit on your butt in front of the TV for the rest of the day. I just upped mine from sedentary to the next level due to my workouts and it really didn't change my allowed caloric intake that much.

smokinjackd

Oh, and cool toque..

sunlover89

Ok thanks, I'm studying which is why i'm sedentary and I don't own a tv :-P What's a toque?

beckyboop712

I also sit for most of the day but I walk to work (10 min each way), take the stairs 2-3 times a day (and now the stairs in my apartment building), go for walks at lunch and I am always running around the office. But because I don't log that part of my day as exercise, I have upped it to lightly active.

Mokey41

It depends if you're talking about MFP settings or TDEE settings. On MFP you put sedentary and then log intentional exercise that you do. For TDEE you include your exercise in your setting and it specifies what those things would be. With MFP you can eat those calories back if you wish, with TDEE you don't.

sunlover89

Ok, so I just changed my MFP settings to "lightly active" and it still reccomends 1200 a day..weird, am I doing this wrong? I can't find anywhere to change my TDEE

Mokey41

Your MFP setting would be sedentary since you sit mostly for your job and then add your exercise. If you want to do TDEE you could use lightly active but you have to find an online calculator, get that number, deduct 20% and then manually enter it.

MFP won't go lower than 1200 so you must be picking too aggressive of a weight loss goal and it's bottoming out at 1200.

krhn

Depends on your goal:
Lose weight = choose sedentary as you are underestimating the amount of exercise you may do which increase the caloric deficit and vice versa if its weight gain!