Calories disappearing?

nicolelw8

Hi all,

I pair MyFitness Pal with my FitBit and track the calorie adjustments carefully. At the end of the night MyFitness Pal will say I have 150 calories remaining but when I wake up in the morning & look at yesterday’s activity it now says I overate by 100 calories. This happens EVERY day. Am I missing something? It’s extremely frustrating and misleading.

Thanks for reading!

Best,
Nicole

Andiebeanluvsu

Your calorie adjustment from fitbit is just an estimate based on your activity up to whatever point it synced. So if you do a lot of activity in the beginning of the day, and then do nothing the rest of the day, you will see that number gradually go down. I try to leave at least 100 or so calories uneaten at the end of the day to account for the decrease.

nicolelw8

Thanks for the help!

meltedsno

You can fix this by going into the settings on the fitbit dashboard. click on "preferences" then go to "calorie estimation" and click on "disable". I had the same issue going on as well and was so frustrated when I would think I had 400 calories left to eat and then come to find at the end of the night that it would change to 100 or whatever. I never eat back my exercise calories so I never went over my calorie budget. It took a bit of research to find out this was the cause of fluctuating calories left to eat, but it took care of the problem.

StaciMarie1974

MfP thinks you are going to burn X per day, based on your activity level & stats. Which also means MFP thinks you are going to burn X/24 per hour. In reality, you burn a rate during some hours and lower during others. Like during the day living your life, or working out: high. At night sleeping: low.

When you sync w/ Fitbit, MFP looks at the # burned and says you're ahead or behind schedule. At the time you synced, you were ahead. But then if you went to bed, your rate of burn slowed down. So you didn't burn as much after hh:mm time as MFP thought.

Two ways around this. One - change your MFP level to sedentary. Not a perfect fix but it will expect less per hour from you. So the mismatch will be less. Or Two - google your BMR and divide it by 24 to know what you'll burn per hour when you are 'done' for the day. You can use this info to extrapolate where you'll end the day. Like right now there are about 10 hours left in my day, my BMR is almost 60/hr. So if I were to do nothing for the rest of the day I'd burn 600 more. I'm at 1062 right now, so round up (since I'm not 'done' for the day) and I'll hit 1700. Which isn't enough IMO so I'll be sure and do more to earn more calories spent.

jerber160

I'll ask here too. does a fitbit work if you wear it on your ankle? does it have to strap on with the strap given?