My Fitness Pal vs. Dotfit, huge disprities.

There are tons of different websites that calculate calorie targets for you. Look around and get more opinions.

When you use MFP it expects you to log your workouts and eat back the earned exercise calories. Are you taking this into account? Usually this brings it in line with other calculators on the web (which tend to include your workout calories whether you do the workout or not).

True, but standing for almost 40 hours a week every week, there's no way to put that in. I understand it doesn't burn a TON of calories, but standing for 8 hours at a time definitely burns more than being sedentary. So I'm never sure of my "actual" calories. It's just frustrating. How do I know how much I'm supposed to eat if I can't log simple things like that, or weight lifting exercises that have no metric for calories burned.

I'm totally on board with the food diary, ad I enjoy the huge library they have, but I want to be able to accurately use the calories meter, and I feel like I'm missing something.

I think I found a website that estimated standing calories burned, and it ended up being about 5 calories an hour more than sitting. So, you get essentially and extra 40 calories a day for the 5 working days (I'm assuming you get two days off).

However, all calorie burns are estimates. The calorie listing on the back of food packaging is an estimate. What if you only burned an extra 35 calories, and that taco you eat has an extra 100 calories?! What will you do?!?!?!

Nothing. Don't sweat the small stuff. Start with a calorie intake level (you can look at several calculators and go with an average) and stick with that for a month. Look at your weight at the end of the month. Did you lose what you were expecting or not? Cut out an additional 100 calories if you aren't losing at a moderate rate. Do it for another month and reassess. Losing too quickly? Eat more food. Etc.

And be sure that your counting of calories is as accurate as possible, because if it's not, what's the point? Weigh your food with a scale. Use a heart rate monitor for exercise. Log exercise calories correctly (if you're using MFP as designed you eat back the exercise calories), and don't count standing, chewing gum, or sex as exercise.

It really will be fine.

MFP can handle both of those things, you just may not have looked in the right place.

Re: daily calorie expenditure if you go to My Home and then Goals, your total calories from normal daily activity is displayed in the right hand column. This reflects the # of calories you burn before exericse.

Re: your standing all day, change your activity level from sedentary to lightly active as that is for folks who work on their feet all day. To do this, you can go to My Home then Settings then Update diet/fitness profile.

Once you change those up and add in your average exericse, I'd bet it'll be pretty close to what that other site gave you for calories.

I would also assume that Dotfit includes exercise in your caloric requirment, whereas MFP only accounts for it when you log it, which is why you are suppose to eat those cals back.

And MFP does tell you how many cals you burn being alive, go to goal>look at the top right, "cals burned from normal daily activity"