Step counter and activity levels

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the_snappy_croc
the_snappy_croc Posts: 18 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
Apologies if there's a thread on this already!

I have my iPhone synced up with MFP which is great for picking up my activity. On average I do 10-12000 steps a day. Should my activity level be set to Sedentary? If it's set to something else will I be doubling up my exercise calories? Very confused!

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  • RelevantGains
    RelevantGains Posts: 83 Member
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    Yes, probably. It's very confusing.

    Others may disagree with me, but I'd advise everyone to STOP tracking exercise in MFP. It leads to a lot of confusion about how many calories you're consuming, there's inaccuracies with step counters and calories burned, etc. It's much simpler and more accurate to calculate a TDEE with your weekly exercise factored in and not sync your steps with MFP and not eat back your activity calories.
  • Marshallwaller
    Marshallwaller Posts: 1 Member
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    I am equally confused. I did note that I can either let MFP log my steps taken from my Fitbit, which always seems to give me more calories than I would expect, or if I manually input my exercises into MFP the Fitbit step log goes away. I am not positive but I think "RelevantGains" has the right idea: just use MFP for food to get a sense of how many calories you have consumed and let Fitbit track the exercise; I thing one of these apps actually makes that suggestion as well.
  • powered85
    powered85 Posts: 297 Member
    edited August 2016
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    RelevantGains wrote: »
    Yes, probably. It's very confusing.

    Others may disagree with me, but I'd advise everyone to STOP tracking exercise in MFP. It leads to a lot of confusion about how many calories you're consuming, there's inaccuracies with step counters and calories burned, etc. It's much simpler and more accurate to calculate a TDEE with your weekly exercise factored in and not sync your steps with MFP and not eat back your activity calories.

    but what do you do on rest days? I've been doing the MFP method for a long time and eating back exercise calories to hit a certain target - though all but walking calories are calculated using a heart rate monitor - with tdee don't you need to mindfully cut calories down quite a bit on rest days? Or do do you do a set amount each day and it levels out by weeks end?

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