When you have to find out how many calories you burn in a day, you put your info in a calculator and it undoubtedly asks for your activity level. So what do you choose? Here are the meaning of the activity levels:
Sedentary
- If you’re sedentary, your daily activities include:
- Activities of daily living only, such as shopping, cleaning, watering plants, taking out the trash, walking the dog, mowing the lawn and gardening.
- No moderate of vigorous activities.
- Unless you do at least 30 minutes per day of intentional exercise, you are considered sedentary.
- Spending most of the day sitting (e.g. bank teller, desk job)
- The majority of people will be considered sedentary.
Lightly Active
- If you’re lightly active, your daily activities include:
- Activities of daily living only, such as shopping, cleaning, watering plants, taking out the trash, walking the dog, mowing the lawn and gardening.
- Daily exercise that is equal to walking for 30 minutes at 4mph. For an adult of average weight, this amount of exercise will burn about 130-160 additional calories.
- More intense exercise can be performed for less time to achieve the same goal. For example, 15-20 minutes of vigorous activity, such as aerobics, skiing or jogging on a daily basis would put you in this category.
- Spending a good part of the day on your feet (e.g. teacher, salesman)
Active
- If you’re active, your daily activities include:
- Activities of daily living only, such as shopping, cleaning, watering plants, taking out the trash, walking the dog, mowing the lawn and gardening.
- Daily exercise that is equal to walking for 1 hour and 45 minutes at 4mph. For an adult of average weight, this amount of exercise will burn about 470-580 additional calories.
- More intense exercise can be performed for less time. For example, jogging for 50 minutes per day.
- Spending a good part of the day doing some physical activity (e.g. waitress, mailman)
Very Active
- If you’re very active, your daily activities include:
- Activities of daily living only, such as shopping, cleaning, watering plants, taking out the trash, walking the dog, mowing the lawn and gardening.
- Daily exercise that is equal to walking for 4 hours and 15 minutes at 4mph. For an adult of average weight, this amount of exercise will burn about 1,150-1400 additional calories.
- More intense exercise can be performed for less time. For example, jogging for 2 hours minutes per day.
- Spending most of the day doing heavy physical activity (e.g. bike messenger, carpenter)
Source: Visualizing nutrition: Everyday choices. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
So what did you learn from this?
Going to the gym a few times a week doesn’t automatically make you lightly active. So if you work at a desk job and lift heavy things at the gym a few times a week, then you’re probably sedentary. Most people are going to have to choose sedentary and suck it up that they can’t eat so much if they are cutting. That’s the reality. If you don’t like it, move around more! Go for a brisk walk everyday or just be more active to put yourself in that lightly-active state.
There’s also something called NEAT which stands for Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis, which is basically all the stuff you do in a day that burn calories that are not intentionally for exercise. The fact is that staying in front of a computer all day burns almost no more calories than lying in bed. If for 8 hours a day you are on the computer and barely get up and move around, then your NEAT is quite low during that time. If, however, you decide to get up every hour on the hour and do some activity for 5 minutes, this will increase your NEAT. For more info check out Lyle Mcdonalds article: Role of Nonexercise Activity Thermogenesis in Resistance to Fat Gain in Humans – Research Review.
Anyway, hope that helps!
