Please help me calculate exercise calories (cardio and weights)

Active should be fine. What calorie goal did that give you?

Hollis300 wrote: »

sijomial wrote: »

"I still wish there was a formula or device that could measure or calculate the calorie burn to a closer degree."

There really isn't a good way to measure energy from the activity you describe.
Steps doesn't work well with your lifting and heartrate would be a very poor metric for general working activity.
Fitness trackers could give you a number but it's unlikely to be a better stab in the dark.

Suggest you just trial the Active setting for 4 - 6 weeks, see what your weight trend starts to look like, assess your general energy and hunger levels and adjust if required.

Thanks, just saw this. Will try the active setting (and maybe do something nuts, like track the amount I lift for a week and see what the average per day looks like).

The calorie burn from lifting stuff isn't very high, even though it feels effortful. It's also hard to estimate, maybe harder than cardio-type stuff. If you were doing weight workouts in the normal rep/set format, I'd suggest you use the MFP database to estimate the calories from that kind of workout. It's better than most of the other bad methods. However: 1. It doesn't burn very many calories, and 2. It doesn't apply to your occupational lifting scenario which isn't a reps/sets thing.

I think others have given you good advice, to set your activity level and adjust your goal based on average weekly results after 4-6 weeks.

If you want something other than MFP activity level as an estimate, capturing the walking and general movement aspects of your job - as a standard sort of fitness tracker might do - is probably as good as anything. The lifting per se probably isn't adding a lot of calorie burn. Even with a fitness tracker, you'd still want to treat it as a 4-6 week experiment, then adjust. A tracker's just a different type of statistical estimate, more personalized, but still an estimate.

All calorie burn estimating (exercise and basic life) is an experimental, individual thing. Most people are close to average, so MFP or a standard fitness tracker can make a pretty good guess. It can still be inaccurate, but probably more because an individual person is statistically unusual, rather than that the calculator, MFP, or fitness tracker is objectively inaccurate.

It may not be obvious why a particular person is non-average, either. My logging experience suggests I burn 25-30% more calories on an average day than either MFP or my fitness tracker expect me to do. I could only speculate as to why, even though I know from experience that it's true. 🤷‍♀️

Hollis300 wrote: »

Instead, I give myself a 200 calorie burn for 8 hours of low-speed walking, standing, climbing short ladders, stooping, reaching overhead, and crawling around on the floor. [...] I give myself an additional 300 calorie burn for 8 hours of lifting/dragging/hauling objects or boxes that weigh anywhere from a couple of pounds to 40 pounds, or once in a while more.

These simple approaches can be very effective. Your general weight trend over time allows you to compensate up or down a bit.

Hollis300 wrote: »

When I go home, I hurt all over, take aspirin, and lie down. I usually recover by the next day, but sometimes feel the way I felt years ago after a car crash on the Beltway around D.C. -- like a snowplow ran over me. I'm not gaining weight and am slowly losing. My weight right now is solidly normal.

Are you new to this job? I'm a desk-jockey, but I would expect adaptation over time. It sounds like how I feel after a day of hiking, or something like that.

Hollis300 wrote: »

@Jthanmyfitnesspal I've worked at this job for about 18 months -- it pays more for my area. This is not a career move, something I'm temporarily doing. Previously, I was an office worker who hiked occasionally and was in good health, but not an athlete. My level of exhaustion depends on the workload, which varies every night. Some nights are easier, some not.

***

I will add the comments here that this is not exercise offended me (my doctor certainly thinks it's exercise), but I looked up the definition of exercise and understand the people who said that must mean the academic definition, that exercise is an activity intended to improve or maintain physical fitness or for enjoyment -- in other words, not for pay.

However, many people also use the word exercise to mean physical activity in general. For example, when I shop for groceries I typically carry them to my car instead of using a cart, if I can, because the weight is good for my bones -- so that would be exercise according to MFPers, but if I do the same thing at my job, that's not exercise, but activity.

I'm signing off here and won't check back. Thanks again for the comments and suggestions.

For clarity - not for OP who has signed off the thread, but for completeness - when I say it's not exercise, I don't mean that it isn't hard, doesn't burn calories, isn't useful for strength or cardiovascular fitness, etc. Occupations can meet all those criteria.

What I mean, and what I expect others mean, is that occupational activity tends to be uneven or intermittent across the day, more of some activities sometimes but less of others, variable weights of things lifted/carried, etc.

Most "exercise" - at least the kind one has some hope of estimating semi-accurately - is doing a somewhat consistent thing for a defined period of time. Even interval exercise - which it's common to see mentioned here as difficult to estimate accurately - tends to be some consistent pattern like one minute hard, one minute easy, for ten rounds . . . or something like that. If someone lifts weights in a standard reps/sets pattern with normal rests between sets, that's patterned/regular. If I row a boat or rowing machine for an hour at some intensity, that's a pretty consistent thing for a well-defined period. And so forth.

Intermittent/variable things are hard to estimate, and the more intermittent/variable they are, the more difficult to estimate. Occupations tend to fall into that category.

IMO, that's literally why most research-based calorie estimating approaches try to treat occupational activity as a large variable blob of activity that for most people averages out to a particular range of calorie burn, along with routine home chores and such. Even though some home/work tasks are in the database, it tends not to work well to estimate base calories, then estimate usual intermittent but regular home chores, job, etc., as separate add-ons. In a way, fitness trackers do try to do that, but they've put a lot of serious research and software design/testing into how to do it better than worse.

Whether I am paid to do something certainly has nothing to do with whether I'd estimate it as exercise or not. I'd estimate something as an exercise if it isn't part of my regular average routine, has a start/stop, is somewhat consistent effort during the activity, and that sort of thing. That is, whether it's "exercise like" in ability to estimate it.

Some paid jobs that are quite repetitive might fit an exercise definition, like if I was a bicycle courier, running around town at top speed on my bike, and timing how much time/miles I spent riding. (Even then, to avoid the annoyance of estimating every work day in detail, personally I'd probably set myself at very active, then adjust calories upward if needed based on experience. But it could be estimated as exercise, because it fits within exercise-like parameters.)

Carrying vs. carting my groceries to car is not an exercise I'd estimate separately, but it's something I do IRL for the kind of reasons OP mentions. Neither is some day when maybe I run the vacuum cleaner for a longer time, rather than just doing a quick sweep. I think trying to estimate that sort of routine thing makes calorie estimates overall less accurate, not more. If I spend a solid 2 hours shoveling snow, yeah, I'll estimate that as exercise. No one pays me.

Nothing about saying "that job is not an exercise" is about dissing the value of the activities for fitness, health or calorie burn.

Jthanmyfitnesspal wrote: »

People will not that I've also argued that these devices AREN'T that accurate. This is true, and you should eat back additional calories conservatively. Leave a few on the table!

I run distance with a Polar watch and I have to say, they are getting a lot better with calorie burn, especially when monitoring HR. An average day has me eating 3000 calories a day and I only leave about 10% on the table and am able to still lose/maintain my weight.

Lietchi wrote: »

aCountryVegan wrote: »

Jthanmyfitnesspal wrote: »

People will not that I've also argued that these devices AREN'T that accurate. This is true, and you should eat back additional calories conservatively. Leave a few on the table!

I run distance with a Polar watch and I have to say, they are getting a lot better with calorie burn, especially when monitoring HR. An average day has me eating 3000 calories a day and I only leave about 10% on the table and am able to still lose/maintain my weight.

And for me my Garmin systematically underestimates my exercise calories and TDEE. And it's getting worse as I increase my fitness level. Leaving calories 'on the table' would not have been a good idea for me, I need around 200 calories more per day than my tracker estimates.

I don't like the generic advice that people should not eat all of their exercise calories. It needs to be completed with 'and then monitor your weight trend and adjust accordingly'. Yes, fitness trackers can overestimate, but underestimate as well.

No kidding. Averaging over the past year, Garmin thinks I burned 1730 calories per day, all inclusive.

Over the same time period, I've had my goal set at 1850 calories, plus eat back all exercise calories, so gross intake is only 1850 on my one weekly rest day, but more like 2100-2500 or so most days. Probably 2 to 4 times a month, I eat well over my 1850+exercise goal . . . many hundreds of calories over, even thousands over sometimes.

I looked at Libra a year back. A high day in the week a year ago around this date was 129.8 pounds, this week 129.2. Feels like maintaining?

Background: I wear the watch 24x7 except when it's charging; charging is a few minutes per week, not enough to make a material difference. I use Garmin's exercise for all but walking (ExRx) and strength training. (MFP).

Good trackers will be close for most people, because most people are average. Statements that "they always overestimate" are incorrect. Some people they overestimate, some they underestimate, and the reasons may not be obvious . . . other than the (unhelpful) generic reason that their estimating algorithms are based on averages, so under/over estimating is probably more about how average the user is, not how good the device is.

Monitor and adjust: Good plan.