What % of your calorie adjustment do you eat back?

Verity1111

I just started syncing my FitBit and upping my calories.... It estimates I burn 2900+ calories per day. I'm 178.8lbs and 5'4". Does this seem right? Steps per day average this week is 12,000. I don't manually log anything, even if I use the bike at the gym (which it does not track automatically).

heybales

If this is HR-based device, you didn't mention which model - then the first week or two it's still trying to figure out you.

Where is restingHR at, where does the exercise level start so that HR-based calorie burn is used above, step-based below, how often to exercise, ect.

But the adjustment may show up on the exercise tab, as that's the easiest place to put it and deal with the math for MFP - but it's not by requirement exercise.

You could do no exercise and just be more active than MFP profile selection, and get big adjustment.
You could do hard workout and then be really lazy, and get no adjustment.

If you trusted MFP's estimate of eating calories based on daily burn calculated from 4 rough daily activity levels and you likely guessing one, and logging workouts accurately - then you should really trust the Fitbit after the first 2 weeks - because it's actually with you seeing what you do.

There are a few tweaks to improve accuracy, and then knowing when you should manually log exercise on Fitbit for best estimate.

In otherwords after tweaking - all of them.

Francl27

My fitbit is accurate, but the adjustment that MFP gives me isn't (it always gives me an extra 200 calories or something). I trust the 'calories left' info on my Fitbit dashboard instead.

Christine_72

Verity1111 wrote: »

I just started syncing my FitBit and upping my calories.... It estimates I burn 2900+ calories per day. I'm 178.8lbs and 5'4". Does this seem right? Steps per day average this week is 12,000. I don't manually log anything, even if I use the bike at the gym (which it does not track automatically).

I'm all over the place, i sometimes eat back 30%, 50%, 75% or all or none! It depends on my hunger levels.

I'm 5"8 and 149lbs, plus a lot older than you at 45. For 16,000 steps fitbit gives me a total of 2373 calories, which translates to 633 calories being imported in to MFP.

I've always been too scared to eat back 100% of my exercise calories regularly, i should have been at my goal weight ages ago which tells me that fitbit may be slightly optimistic in my burns, i have an Alta (no HR). I am 1.5kgs away from from goal, and it's killing me!!!!! Once i get there, i will spend a month meticulously logging every crumb and eat back 100% and see what happens
I weigh and log pretty accurately now, but there are times here and there where i won't log the hand full of chips i steal from my hubby's pack or a cookie i had walking through the kitchen, these are not regular occurrences, but until i reign it in perfectly i wont know for sure how accurate fitbit is.

Apologies for the long post, and after all that i didnt answer your question! My advice is trial and error.

tunaboi

I generally eat back 80-90% of the calories that I burn. This is of course after the MFP does the adjustments because the calories burned on the Fitbit app seems excessive.

CMB1979

I generally eat back 0-15% at most. I just don't buy that I'm burning what it (Charge2 + MFP) says (3500-4000/day) after years of self-abuse with yo-yo dieting. But it's only been a week since I got the Fitbit and linked it to MFP, so we'll see when I weigh myself. If I'm right, I will have lost around 2 lbs this week. If MFP/Fitbit is right, I should lose closer to 4 lbs. I'm pretty sure I'm correct.