How many calories burnt a day is Sedentary calculated to be?

ianblackburn
ianblackburn Posts: 26 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
I am trying out the Argus app - it looks great for use with an iPhone 5s because it makes use of the M7 processor and tracks your activity even if the app isn't running - so battery life should be largely unaffected. I just installed it and it had all my activity from the last week already!

So the question is how to use it with MyFitnessPal?

I assume I set activity as sedentary and then use the recordings from the app to add activity. However I am not sure how to calculate that. Yesterday for example when I wasn't very active I recorded 998 steps and 1772 calories, and on a previous day when I was more active 6666 steps and 1934 calories. The question is what does myfitnesspal equate sedentary as in terms of calories? If I know that then it would be a simple matter of subtracting from the Argus total.

Cheers

Ian

Replies

  • JenMc14
    JenMc14 Posts: 2,389 Member
    It sounds like the app records everything, even your "living calories". That would. Be what MFP does, too. There are several different formulas one can use. The app is probably calculating your TDEE, that would be the total calories you're using each day, so you wouldn't add or subtract, just eat under that number to lose.

    But, take that with a grain of salt, it's a guess based on what you've said. I'm not familiar with the app. Perhaps try to find what it says it calculates and go from there.
  • paulperryman
    paulperryman Posts: 839 Member
    Yes. Sedentary includes an a judgement of what an average person of your weight, height and age would burn doing a 40hr sitting job , X amount of walking, general activites like preparing food and washing etc + sleep. there was a Xcel file someone had posted on the Roadmap thread that listed it.

    so Sedentary is your supposed BMR x1.2 Light Activity is that x1.5 moderate is that x2 etc or something to that effect but if you have a way of testing your average TDEE not including exercise (or include exercise if it's regular and roughly the same each time) you can use that figure instead and set sedentary, as i type this i have had my Heart Rate Monitor on for close to 23hrs to get a TDEE reading of an average work day where i wasn't going to be going to the gym (rest day) and it so far equates to roughly light activity based on my height weight and age.

    so that would be my baseline to go under for diet purpose and any exercise ontop would either give me a even bigger deficit or i could eat more and still lose the same (theoretically) tho the body doesn't work that way unless you are very fat you don't just lose "weight" steadily because of Diet and Exercise the body seems to decide what it wants to do.
  • meerkat70
    meerkat70 Posts: 4,605 Member
    Yes. Sedentary includes an a judgement of what an average person of your weight, height and age would burn doing a 40hr sitting job , X amount of walking, general activites like preparing food and washing etc + sleep. there was a Xcel file someone had posted on the Roadmap thread that listed it.

    so Sedentary is your supposed BMR x1.2 Light Activity is that x1.5 moderate is that x2 etc or something to that effect but if you have a way of testing your average TDEE not including exercise (or include exercise if it's regular and roughly the same each time) you can use that figure instead and set sedentary, as i type this i have had my Heart Rate Monitor on for close to 23hrs to get a TDEE reading of an average work day where i wasn't going to be going to the gym (rest day) and it so far equates to roughly light activity based on my height weight and age.

    so that would be my baseline to go under for diet purpose and any exercise ontop would either give me a even bigger deficit or i could eat more and still lose the same (theoretically) tho the body doesn't work that way unless you are very fat you don't just lose "weight" steadily because of Diet and Exercise the body seems to decide what it wants to do.

    True in principle, but applying that to MFP's calculation of sedentary, and cals for weight loss is slightly more complex. My BMR is 1800ish. MFP gives me just 1340 base cals, on the 'sedentary' setting, for 2lb pw loss. It gives my BMR for the 1lb per week loss setting.
  • ctinawilson
    ctinawilson Posts: 127 Member
    Bump for when my Iphone 5s arrives ;)

    Also thank you for mentioning Argus I will give it a try.
  • ianblackburn
    ianblackburn Posts: 26 Member
    Thanks for the comments everyone!

    Just looking into the app a little more - when you tap the calories for the day it breaks it into Basal Cal and Steps Cal which helps a bit - I think.

    However - As I understand it, MFP adds 20% to the basal cal automatically for sedentary level. So ideally anything above that should be adjusted on MFP by adding activity. If I am below it then I need to get out a walk a bit!!!

    For me this means that because my TDEE is 2181 (I used this: http://iifym.com/tdee-calculator/) then anything significantly over that recorded by Argus I'll add as activity, and if I am lower I'll do something about it. I think I'll round to 2100 to make life simpler.

    Of course this would be a whole lot easier if the app integrated directly into MFP as Striiv does (I tried striiv BTW - it is good but found it a battery drain so until they update to support M7 I'll stick with Argus)

    Or even if MFP showed it's calculated TDEE and BMR somewhere - I can't find it if it does...

    Cheers

    Ian
  • djtelesca
    djtelesca Posts: 3 Member
    So to clarify: If you're using Argus, which separates out step calories from basal cals, you should just set MFP to sedentary and manually add the step calories? That seems to be fairly consistent with what I was getting with my fitbit.
  • ianblackburn
    ianblackburn Posts: 26 Member
    Yes that is what I am doing - I have emailed Argus support to confirm but it seems about right so far.
  • Zairip
    Zairip Posts: 3 Member
    Yes that is what I am doing - I have emailed Argus support to confirm but it seems about right so far.

    Did you ever get a response from them?

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