Sedentary or lightly active?

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KourtneyChristine wrote: »

I want to lose weight is the big thing! So I work out 3-4 times a week for 40-60 minutes for each session. She I keep my fitness level at sedentary to lose weight? Or should I bump it to lightly active? I'm losing weight! Slowly. Like 0.5Lbs a week and I have it set to 2lbs a week. I do eat some calories I work off but not all of them because I am full sometimes. Not sure what to do.

The activity level is exclusive of your workouts. It means your daily life. If you are predominently sitting throughout the day then you should likely keep it the sedentary. If you are more active in your daily life then change it. @kuroshii is right to ask if you are eating back calories and how you are tracking them. MFP and most calorie trackers are inaccurate and you need to play around with how much you should be eating back.

Yeah, to me this means - if you work full time - what kind of job do you have? For me, I sit at a desk all day, so I consider myself sedentary. My husband works in a lumber warehouse; he's up and down on a forklift all day, lifting lumber, etc. I call him lightly active - he's usually sedentary in the evenings.

In my opinion, you should set your calories to as high as possible so that you don't slow your metabolism more than necessary. Doing it this way will not slow your weightloss in fact it will make weightloss easier and more pleasant.

You should set your speed of weightloss according to your current weight. If you are just overweight or even inside your healthy weight range but well above goal, then you should not try to lose more than one pound a week. If you are obese two pounds a week is fine.

It is better not to rush it. It's more sustainable.

Over a period of say about three months of calorie restriction your metabolism will start to slow. The effects are quite subtle but the one that may concern you most is that you can't eat as much as is fun and you may start to feel deprived. Other effects are lowering of energy and motivation, increased sensitivity to cold, more likely to catch cold and contagious illness, more fatigue, lowered mood. Basically you will just become less effective all round.

You have to look past your job. I work a desk job, but I also get up and walk around on occasion (to talk to people). But even more so than that, when I get home I walk around and do stuff (dishes, playing with kids, yard work, etc...), or I go out to a store and walk around if I have to shop.

Heck, the job descriptions for sedentary on this website are so misleading anyways. They have bank teller as sedentary, but every single bank teller I know is constantly walking, either to grab something from the printer, to go work the drive through, or drop something off I just handed them.

My advise, is to set it to sedentary at first if it makes you feel good. If you accurately log your food and log your exercise and eat most of it back you'll probably find that lightly active fits better. However, you need to keep an accurate long term recording of weight loss. People are quick to forget how much weight they have lost and do a poor job of averaging it out unless it is in a spreadsheet.