Help With Lifestyle Activity

ayeishamaria · 06-24-2010, 09:12 PM

Okay, so today I did some exercise & my lifestyle is "mostly seated with some movement". The time I exercised was taken out of 24 hours( from what I understand). For example, I did 30 minutes of calisthenics and burned 211 calories.

The rest of the time is logged under "lifestyle". It says that I have burned 1,953 calories for that. I don't understand how that is possible considering I just started FitDay this morning.

Can someone please explain to me what this means?

DecemberBlue · 06-25-2010, 05:20 AM

I'm pretty new to this site also, but the lifestyle that you chose; fitday calculates/estimates how much you will burn based on your gender/weight and that lifestlye...that's amount is an estimate for the entire day...and may change as you add exercise; otherwise I think it stays the same...we'll see if the more experience on here say different.

rpmcduff · 06-25-2010, 02:49 PM

DecemberBlue is correct. The 1,953 calories for your lifestyle activity are for 23 hours and 30 minutes. You haven't burned all of these yet, but you will by the end of the day. If you want to see how Fitday gets this go to the Activities tab, from the menu on the left side choose 'Customize Metabolism'. You will see a screen with three choices for how to calculate your base metabolic rate (Mifflin, Harris-?... and Custom). The Mifflin and Harris.. both show a base rate and I believe Mifflin is the default. Below these are the choices for your lifestyle. When you go to the activities screen again (if you haven't entered any activities for the day) you will see 24 hours for your lifestyle and the calories that Fitday has calculated for a day. As a default this is the Mifflin number plus the lifestyle (sedentary, seated with some movement, etc...) calories.

This number is very important. You will need to acheive a calorie deficit (through a combination of diet and exercise) for weight loss to occur. It is usually recommended that you try to acheive a 500-700 calorie deficit per day. So if 1,953 (your base metabolism) plus 211 (your exercise) = 2164 calories burned. You now know you can eat 1664 calories and acheive your 500 calorie deficit. By the way 500 calories/day deficit equals approximately 1 pound/week weight loss. Hope this helps! Welcome and Good luck!

VitoVino · 12-31-2011, 04:20 PM

bump

noclaw · 01-21-2012, 07:49 AM

I really like the depth which Fitday allows me to keep track of my fitness, but I can see how it can be too much. Fitday starts by predicting your calories burned each day based upon your lifestyle choice and also based upon being awake for a 24 hours. When you put in your sleep hours, it takes a significant chunk out of your calories burned. Logging your other activities will make changes up or down, depending upon the activity.

When I first started, the activity section seemed overly complicated, so, I made some shortcuts. I decided to only log exercise activities (with an occasional exception). As an offset for not entering sleep and sedentary activities, I selected a lifestyle one level below what it actually is. The idea is that it would average out in the long run; it worked pretty well and it helped me lose weight.

That being said... Over the holidays, I gained a bunch of weight. I decided to try being more accurate: I selected my proper lifestyle and I've been logging most of my activities (about 75% of my day). Just like with food, this takes an initial investment in time after which the "recent" tab is a big help. One thing this does (again, just like food) is make one aware about how many calories you expend (or take in) on a daily basis, which is very important with weight loss.

If you're consistent with entering food/activity/weight and find that you're gaining or losing weight that's inconsistent with your calorie deficit or excess, Fitday has a nice feature that allows you to customize your metabolism. Just enter a base rate which raises or lowers your overall rate.

VitoVino · 01-21-2012, 01:26 PM

Great post, noclaw.

I agree that the FitDay software is robust and one can tweak it to be as precise as humanly possible, only this takes a greater investment in time to log all the daily activities. Or one could decide to be more "ballpark", investing less time logging, and thus choose to log only exercise activities along with sleep (which is what I do), in which case the FD software is STILL pretty accurate as it reflects the calories burned.

Good analysis.