Counting exercise help

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benee16
benee16 Posts: 23 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
I'm using a garmin vivofit to track my activities. I had started out with a light fitness activity level on both mfp settings and garmin settings in December. MFP is set up for me to lose 1.5 lbs a week. So when I do activites through the syncing from garmin, my calories adjust each day according to my activity level. Today I changed both settings to reflect my current activity level now, which is to do about 6 or more miles of walking a day, plus the other workouts I do, which amounts to about 3 hours on top of the walking. So when syncing the garmin to mfp, does this adjust for my new activity level which is active, or do I need to exclude the additional exercises from calories needed to eat. I want to make sure I'm not eating back too many calories. Thanks for the help.

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  • hill8570
    hill8570 Posts: 1,466 Member
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    You'll either want to stop syncing the the garmin (basically going TDEE instead of NEAT) or set MFP back to Sedentary and get the activity points from the garmin. Can't have it both ways.
  • benee16
    benee16 Posts: 23 Member
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    Do I have to log from sedentary for it to be accurate? I've been logging from lightly active since January and losing about 1.5 a week. I was getting tired of the calorie additions daily and was hoping it would be more evened out, and still log the amount of work I'm doing on my vivofit.
  • hill8570
    hill8570 Posts: 1,466 Member
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    OK, this is probably far more detail than you're looking for, but MFP uses something similar to the Harris-Benedict formula for calculating your "base" calories. H-B is as follows:
    Harris Benedict Formula

    To determine your total daily calorie needs, multiply your BMR by the appropriate activity factor, as follows:

    If you are sedentary (little or no exercise) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.2
    If you are lightly active (light exercise/sports 1-3 days/week) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.375
    If you are moderately active (moderate exercise/sports 3-5 days/week) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.55
    If you are very active (hard exercise/sports 6-7 days a week) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.725
    If you are extra active (very hard exercise/sports & physical job or 2x training) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.9

    So, when you changed from lightly active to active, MFP is already allocating you about 13% more calories per day than it was before. So you don't want to double-dip those calories by having them come over from the garmin. How you do that is up to you.

    Personally, if you have a pretty predictable exercise schedule per week, I'd just go TDEE, spread your exercise calories across the week, and just log exercise as 1 calorie (that way you can still track it).
  • benee16
    benee16 Posts: 23 Member
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    That's the problem. Its not consistent. I'm consistently walking over 15000 steps daily, 99% of the time. Then the other exercise varies. I was wondering if changing my MFP setting would give me a more consistent calorie level than having the swings daily that I have, but to still account for the fact that I may not get to the gym 3 - 5 times each week. I think I will set it to active and see how that works with the exercise I log on Garmin. I have 3 months worth of daily logs, and I can compare them to see if they are about the same.

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