Daily Activity Setting?

bump! curious to see answers to this!

Very few people are truly sedentary.

Lightly active at least.

Try this calculator http://www.health-calc.com/diet/energy-expenditure-advanced then subtract your daily deficit off that (500 cal/1lb etc)

I can tell you that I work behind a desk 5 days a week and I am still lightly active since I walk a lot. Also, considering you are really at your goal, you need to make sure you are eating enough. My bigger question is, what are you trying to achieve with your body? Lower body fat?? Also the weight gain can be contributed to a few things but it's all water right now. YOu would have to eat 24500 additional calories about what you burn in order to gain 1 lb of fat. It's probably water retention from exercise or changing your calories so much.

You sound like me. Actually I started a post with the same title.
I am a SAHM and just changed mine to lightly active. I am also on maintain mode so I have lots of calories now.
I reached my goal and kept going down. I wasnt looking at net and kept losing weight. So I took a break and ate a bunch of cookies. 10lbs later I wanted my flat tummy back and was mad when the scale kept going up instead of down again.
I am now making sure I eat at least NET 1400- 1600 calories. I am losing weight still so I am going to slowly add 100 calories a week till I find what will keep me in place.

Good luck to you.

thanks for the additional input everyone! I'm really thinking maybe I should change my daily activity setting back after reading some add'l comments. I've eaten back almost all my exercise cals this evening, and I'm ravenous!

@psulemon- here's my goal........ well, I had actually achieved my goal prior to gaining some of this weight back. At this point, I'm just looking to slim my core area down some more and build some muscle.

If you want to gain some lean muscle mass and still lose body fat, you should probably be eating at maintenance and concentrating on strength training. The key is to provide your muscles as much nutrition as possible to spark growth. Generally, a good rule of thumb is start with maintain and then add a small surplus. Now the tricky part is actually discovering your maintenance calories based on your lifestyle and workout routine. Now, this will take some trial and error but if you know yoru body fat % we wil have a better starting point. If not, then we can take a few appproaches.

First, you would need to estimate your BMR. I would use the link above and confirm it with the link below and post both results. Once we get that, now you just have to tell me what your workout consist of and/or how many calories you burn during your work out. Once we get that, we can set calories for you to eat and monitor for a month (this will allow adequate time to adjust to the new levels). If during that period if you lose weight, we will increase calories by 200. If you maintain, then we maintain, if you gain (more than a pound or two) then we decrease. Unfortunately, unless you get your BMR professionally tested, there is some estimating and monitoring. So let me know and I will post my estimate so others can see/question.



http://www.fat2fitradio.com/tools/bmr/

Thanks psulemon! I went out to this other site- Fat 2 Fit- and the information definitely differs. According to MFP, my BMR is 1273. According to Fat 2 Fit, my BMR is 1358. Sedentary on MFP allows for 1340 cals a day, while Fat 2 Fit allows for 1608. Lightly Active on MFP is 1510, while Fat 2 Fit is 1843.

I normally workout about 5x week. Tues, Thurs, and Sat are a mix of cardio and strength training. I usually do about 30 min of kickboxing and an add'l 25 min of strength training/weights. During these combo days, I normally burn between 500-530 cals according to my Polar FT4. On Wed and Sun, I usually do about 20 min of HIIT. On these days, I burn between 200-220 cals. I also mix running and the Insanity program into my workouts as well, depending on the weather and my mood :-)

Thanks again SOOO much for your help!

You'll find a lot of that difference comes down to the multiplier MFP uses 1.2 for sedentary, wheras Fat2Fit calls that the bedridden category - Hence why very few people on here should be using sedentary unless they're tracking dilligently any movement. F2F's sedentary is MFPs lightly active (then the rest of the difference is the higher BMR to start with)
Go back to lightly active on here at least. You'll feel so much better for it.
But I agree with psule - if you're at goal and lifting, maintenence is best. You'll still trim down that little bit you want.

Thanks psulemon! I went out to this other site- Fat 2 Fit- and the information definitely differs. According to MFP, my BMR is 1273. According to Fat 2 Fit, my BMR is 1358. Sedentary on MFP allows for 1340 cals a day, while Fat 2 Fit allows for 1608. Lightly Active on MFP is 1510, while Fat 2 Fit is 1843.

I normally workout about 5x week. Tues, Thurs, and Sat are a mix of cardio and strength training. I usually do about 30 min of kickboxing and an add'l 25 min of strength training/weights. During these combo days, I normally burn between 500-530 cals according to my Polar FT4. On Wed and Sun, I usually do about 20 min of HIIT. On these days, I burn between 200-220 cals. I also mix running and the Insanity program into my workouts as well, depending on the weather and my mood :-)

Thanks again SOOO much for your help!

Ok, so there are a few approaches we can take. The first, is what I call the MFP approach as it does not incorporate exercise calories into your equation and you would be required to eat back those calories. The second method is using a modified version of katch mcardle (my preference).

MFP approach

BMR x TDEE multiplier (for you we will use lightly active since you have kids) x deficit + exercise

1300 x 1.375 = 1787 x .8 = 1430

1430 is your base calories. So on days you burn 500 then you would eat 1930, on days you burn 300, then you wold eat 1730. I am not a huge fan of this method as you can be "chasing" calories if you didn't preplan your workout. So on average you are eating 1800 calories.


The other method (Katch McArdle) uses teh same principals but looks at a caloric deficit over a weeks span (since weight loss isn't daily). Normally, I would say you are moderately active but since your base is lightly active, I classify you as very active.

1300 x 1.725 = 2242 x .8 = 1794

As you can tell, you still on average eat 1800. With this method you eat 1800 calories every day, regardless of your workouts. Some days you will have a higher deficit, some days you will have smaller one. Some days you might be at maintenance if you don't workout. It's ok, you are working to cut body fat and being close to maintenance is optimal.

On a side note, I am a huge proponent of beachbody programs and prefer doing one of those over a mixture of workouts. I, too, am doing a beach body product; P90X2. It's rediculous. But after 6 weeks, I am already seeing differences; no such much weight but cutting body fat which is my goal.

Thanks psulemon! I went out to this other site- Fat 2 Fit- and the information definitely differs. According to MFP, my BMR is 1273. According to Fat 2 Fit, my BMR is 1358. Sedentary on MFP allows for 1340 cals a day, while Fat 2 Fit allows for 1608. Lightly Active on MFP is 1510, while Fat 2 Fit is 1843.

I normally workout about 5x week. Tues, Thurs, and Sat are a mix of cardio and strength training. I usually do about 30 min of kickboxing and an add'l 25 min of strength training/weights. During these combo days, I normally burn between 500-530 cals according to my Polar FT4. On Wed and Sun, I usually do about 20 min of HIIT. On these days, I burn between 200-220 cals. I also mix running and the Insanity program into my workouts as well, depending on the weather and my mood :-)

Thanks again SOOO much for your help!

Ok, so there are a few approaches we can take. The first, is what I call the MFP approach as it does not incorporate exercise calories into your equation and you would be required to eat back those calories. The second method is using a modified version of katch mcardle (my preference).

MFP approach

BMR x TDEE multiplier (for you we will use lightly active since you have kids) x deficit + exercise

1300 x 1.375 = 1787 x .8 = 1430

1430 is your base calories. So on days you burn 500 then you would eat 1930, on days you burn 300, then you wold eat 1730. I am not a huge fan of this method as you can be "chasing" calories if you didn't preplan your workout. So on average you are eating 1800 calories.


The other method (Katch McArdle) uses teh same principals but looks at a caloric deficit over a weeks span (since weight loss isn't daily). Normally, I would say you are moderately active but since your base is lightly active, I classify you as very active.

1300 x 1.725 = 2242 x .8 = 1794

As you can tell, you still on average eat 1800. With this method you eat 1800 calories every day, regardless of your workouts. Some days you will have a higher deficit, some days you will have smaller one. Some days you might be at maintenance if you don't workout. It's ok, you are working to cut body fat and being close to maintenance is optimal.

On a side note, I am a huge proponent of beachbody programs and prefer doing one of those over a mixture of workouts. I, too, am doing a beach body product; P90X2. It's rediculous. But after 6 weeks, I am already seeing differences; no such much weight but cutting body fat which is my goal.

^Thanks so much for taking the time out! Wow- eating 1800 cals/day sounds wonderful- LOL! I just might try this. Buuuut, let me ask you this. If I want to incorporate a spike day once a week, how should I handle the rest of the week. I've always used a "cheat" day in the past (once a week) and its never been detrimental. But, if I'm already eating 1800 cals/day, I'm worried that might mess me up. I'm not sure I'm able to give up my "spike" day ;-)

I love the Beachbody programs too! I loved doing Insanity and got some amazing results. I would like to do P90X- I'm just not all that thrilled about doing 1.5 hrs of a workout. I've got 2 kiddos at home, and working out consistently for long periods of time just wouldn't work for me unfortunately. I have looked at some of the Chalean programs though.

Thanks again!

Chalean extreme is awesome as well. If you do a p90x program look at x2. I think its much better.


If you want to do a spike day, take 100 calories off each day and use it for your spike day.