can anyone estimate roughly

WHen it says lightly active, moderately active etc... roughly how many cals burned a day would that refer to ?

I burn about 500 cals a day through exercise but dont know which group that puts me in.

I put mine in as sedentary and then log my workouts.  Unless you have an active job, I would not leave it there.  Then when you log exercise it will put in how much you've burned based upon what you were doing.

The actual concept is hazy but the parameters are weight, height and age in that order.  Of course, the equation for men is slightly different than the equation for women.  The constants are different.  Then you can apply a multiplier for your activity level.  In other words you get an estimate of how many calories you will expend in a normal day based on population studies.  Even if we both matched up well with the general population, your moderate would be different than my moderate.  For lightly active, the multiplier is 1.375, which means that your daily activities add more than a 1/3 of the calories that you would expend just sitting around.  In other words, if your base metabolic rate is 1600 calories per day, you are lightly active if you expend an additional 600 calories walking around, doing chores, etc.  The multiplier for moderately active is 1.55.  This generally means that in addition to walking around and doing chores you have a regular exercise routine that brings your average daily calorie expenditure up by 55% of your base level calories.  For Highly active, the multiplier is 1.725, which means that you are probably exercising fairly strenuously every day.

The advantage of putting yourself as sedentary and then listing all of your activities is that you can be pretty accurate.  The disadvantage is that you can spend a lot of time listing stuff you do every day -- I generally expend a couple of hundred calories walking the dog every day.  I also walk about 5 miles (10000 steps) during the course of the day (including the walk with the dog) and I do some yoga or similar workouts.  So I put myself down as lightly active and make that stuff part of my baseline.  Then I list the bigger exercises -- commuting to work on a bicycle (about 1100 calories roundtrip) and my Saturday morning outing (about 2000 calories).  Some weeks, I qualify as highly active.  Other weeks, like this one, I don't manage to fit it all in.

Have to agree with jc353 - entering as sedentary and then adding all activity is a lot of work on top of tracking calories.  I started that way and then to avoid burnout - changed to moderately active which I usually am - and tracking calories only.  I KNOW if I have sedentary or "low" day or extra -high and that tends to balance out to moderately.

I try to keep in the range of moderately active - less 500 and I've been losing at the 1-2 pounds a week over this first 4 weeks - so far, I'm happy with progress, with changing things a little at a time and with a generally, healthier, but not obsessive eating pattern.

Thanks all, I had been using the sedentary figures but thought I must have been going wrong somewhere.