Weight loss as a math problem, but which numbers are wrong?

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Well, here's my opinion for what it's worth.

I have a FitBit as well. I'm 43, only four years older than you, and a bit taller; 6'0".

My goal with my FitBit is to get 10,000 steps per day, which comes out to about 4 miles. I record my weightlifting separately as exercise activity, on the three days per week I trian, but it's a very small number. Lifting for 90 minutes in a gym doesn't burn that many calories.

When I look at my FitBit adjustment on my good days - days I get at or close to 10,000 steps, it's a small number. When I look at your FitBit adjustment, your smallest days dwarf my big days, and your big numbers are really big; like 1,170 and 1,200.

I don't know what you do for a living; maybe you work construction all day long and those are real numbers. But given than you've done the math and the numbers don't add up, my guess is something is off with your FitBit.

Now, that doesn't mean anything is wrong overall, as others have suggested. A 5 lb. weight loss over four weeks is ideal. A pound per week is realistic. I can tell you from experience, trying to hit a calorie deficit over 3,500 for a single week makes me pretty damn hungry. Managing hunger helps us stay on track, and that means eating enough to fuel your activity.

So I think what you're doing is fine, but your FitBit appears to be off (I say that not knowing how much you actually move each day).

subversive99

Hey, thanks for your response. I have my MFP settings set to sedentary and with a goal of 1lb per week, which gives me a calorie goal of 2030 before adjustments. Are you set to sedentary in MFP? If not, there's going to a baseline of activity before you start getting adjustments, whereas I get adjustments almost right away.

I sit at a desk for a living, but walk a fair bit. My step average for the past 8 days is ~9500/day. I don't track my lifting exercise (3x per week), so it's not adding extra calories for that, except inasmuch as it tracks my movement while lifting (and warming up on the treadmill).

Anyway, I assume the fitbit is over estimating about 10%, as noted above. I don't think this is super out of whack, do you?

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Our numbers are really close. Which makes me think your FitBit is way off somehow.

I am set to sedentary and have it set to that on my FitBit. I work from home so unless I go to the gym or go out for a walk, I log less than 700 steps per day.

I have to actually go for a walk to log anything over 1K steps. On a good day, that's 9K to 10K, and my burn from that (reported by FitBit) is nowhere near what you're getting reported. I see your log, and you're getting some days where it is saying 1100 to 1200 calorie burn reported by FitBit. If you're logging 9500 steps and getting a 1200 burn, I think something is off.

Here's an example of a walking calculator:

http://www.shapesense.com/fitness-exercise/calculators/walking-calorie-burn-calculator.aspx

I put in a 4 mile walk in 68 minutes (17-minute mile, which is about what I average over varying terrain) and it gives me a 559 calorie burn. That would be a low-end report by your FitBit and a high one for me. This matches what my FitBit reports.

Now, if you want to be hyper-accurate, you have to SUBTRACT the calories you'd burn if you were sitting for 68 minutes. That would be the true workout burn for the walk. I grabbed a calculator for sitting off the web, and given my weight, etc., it said a 204 burn. So 559 - 204 = 355 calories. And that's about right. And it's also a far cry from 1200 calories reported by your FitBit.

So I'm going to say something is off with your device. Something, somewhere, is input incorrectly.

I think if you were to recalculate all of your steps using the calculator I just linked to in this thread, and used those calorie adjustments (minus calories for sitting) you'd come up with a calorie burn that is probably EXACTLY in-line with the 5 lb. loss you experienced over the four weeks

So my guess is the math works out, the FitBit is just wrong.

snikkins

I have noticed that I get more calories from my FitBit if I get my steps spread out through the day, think like elementary school teacher movement, than if I go in all at once for a walk. I may end up with the same number of steps, but a bigger adjustment.

subversive99

Hmmm, interesting stuff. One thing that you're not considering is that (according to your profile), you have 36 pounds to lose, while I have 65 (and that only gets me to 190, so realistically it's probably 85 more). I think there's a significant extra 'fat guy' burn I get right now just from moving at all.

Just to play around, I put in a run I did the other day. I went 2.5 miles on the treadmill in 30 minutes. The calculator you linked to said it was too fast for that calculator (lol), so I found this one which spits out 463 calories (I found another which spits out an even higher number). Checking my fitbit dashboard from the day I did that run shows a calorie burn of 336 calories over the 30 minute period when I was running.

Obviously this doesn't prove anything, but given that the calculator numbers are higher than what the fitbit reported makes me think that your theory might not hold up. Anyway, it's all good. I took a look at my fitbit profile and I can't find anything to configure other than my height, so not sure what else I could do in any case.

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My lbs. to lose is just a random number. I actually don't care about it.

Body fat percentage is the only metric that matters.

Well, that's not true. My deadlift PR matters more

lynn_glenmont

Angel_Grove_ wrote: »

lynn_glenmont wrote: »

I've done this. Actually I've done this twice, over 8 weeks in the fall of 2013, shortly after starting MFP, and over 9 weeks in the fall of 2014. But I did it to calculate my NEET (the amount of exercise I get from week to week is way too variable to go with TDEE), and got a number more than 200 calories higher than MFP calculated in 2013, and a number about 400 calories higher than MFP calculated in 2014. It didn't send me down some rabbit hole trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. I did a mental happy dance -- more food if I want it, more weight loss if I don't. No need to try to stick to the miserable 1460 calories MFP originally suggested.

Instead of assuming the TDEE calculators are right, why not just assume your logging of calories consumed is correct, add the 59,255 calories you ate over four weeks, the calorie equivalent of the five pounds you lost (17,550), and divide by 28 to find your "real" TDEE of 2740. Even if the TDEE calculators are right and there's something wrong with your logging, isn't it a whole lot simpler to use the TDEE that reflects the way you log, rather than to try to figure out where the mysterious problem(s) is/are in your logging, and then try to find a way to correct them? Your TDEE is 2740 "OP calories," where "OP calories" are the units in which the OP measures the energy in food and the energy his body uses.

I went with 8 weeks of data because I'm a woman, and I wanted to smooth out the hormonal fluctuations. I would think 4 weeks of data would be enough for a man, but, hey, in another 4 weeks you can toss two months of data together and see what you get.

Best of luck. Embrace the numbers.

I'm pretty sure this is the best advice I've seen on MFP to date, and I'm kind of pissed I didn't come up with it.

Aww, shucks, thanks. (wish we had the old emoticon set that included someone blushing)

PAV8888

snikkins wrote: »

I have noticed that I get more calories from my FitBit if I get my steps spread out through the day, think like elementary school teacher movement, than if I go in all at once for a walk. I may end up with the same number of steps, but a bigger adjustment.

I concur with what you say!

Steps earlier in the day and/or interspersed throughout the day seem to "add up" to a higher TDEE, as per Fitbit, than having all the steps in a single (even very fast) walk near the end of the day.

Whether this reflects reality or not, I don't know. But I suspect that their theory is that you burn more when you are active throughout the day (standing up, moving around) as opposed to when you engage in a few (or a lot) of minutes of concentrated walking exercise while sitting around the rest of the day.