So confused!
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JennLH81
Posts: 26 Member
Just created a MFP account 2 days ago, after purchasing a Fit Bit last week. I had been using the FB ap to track my food and exercise, but was getting frustrated with the food database. Did a bit of googling and found MFP! The food database and exercise interface is much more user-friendly! I have my FB synced to my account and use MFP to track all my food and exercise.
I'm VERY confused about how many calories to eat/not eat in order to lose weight. Yesterday I went to bed with 319 calories in the green. This morning I woke up to 81 calories in the red? How do I "lose" calories?? I earned almost 800 going to the gym yesterday.
Also...am I supposed to eat the calories I earn at the gym?
I have both my accounts set to a deficit, but I just don't get it. Thanks for helping a newbie!
I'm VERY confused about how many calories to eat/not eat in order to lose weight. Yesterday I went to bed with 319 calories in the green. This morning I woke up to 81 calories in the red? How do I "lose" calories?? I earned almost 800 going to the gym yesterday.
Also...am I supposed to eat the calories I earn at the gym?
I have both my accounts set to a deficit, but I just don't get it. Thanks for helping a newbie!
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Replies
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Yesterday I went to bed with 319 calories in the green. This morning I woke up to 81 calories in the red? How do I "lose" calories?? I earned almost 800 going to the gym yesterday.
Each day is a new day!
You can't carry calories forward from one day to the next. You should have eaten those 319 yesterday.
You get your normal daily allowance fresh today and can then earn cals.
That's the way MFP works. In reality of course, weight loss can work with a bit of carry-forward or back. Weight Watchers lets you use more or less cals each day so long as you're on goal for the week (ie you can't carry anything forward to next week, or save up for a month to have a massive binge!). I usually go over my cals on MFP on a Friday and am under on a Saturday, and that evens out for me.
Eating your exercise cals - in theory, yes. I eat all of my cals that I earn through exercise and the system works for me. It is intended that you eat any you earn.
However, you'll get a lot of replies saying you should only eat half of them as MFP over-estimates calories. Everyone's different and you have to find what works for you.
I would start by eating them all, give it 4 weeks, and see if you've lost weight. If you eat them all you won't feel too hungry.
However, if you're the sort who'll give up if you don't see a loss, start by eating half and if you lose too quickly then eat more of them.0 -
Just created a MFP account 2 days ago, after purchasing a Fit Bit last week. I had been using the FB ap to track my food and exercise, but was getting frustrated with the food database. Did a bit of googling and found MFP! The food database and exercise interface is much more user-friendly! I have my FB synced to my account and use MFP to track all my food and exercise.
I'm VERY confused about how many calories to eat/not eat in order to lose weight. Yesterday I went to bed with 319 calories in the green. This morning I woke up to 81 calories in the red? How do I "lose" calories?? I earned almost 800 going to the gym yesterday.
Also...am I supposed to eat the calories I earn at the gym?
I have both my accounts set to a deficit, but I just don't get it. Thanks for helping a newbie!
I know what you mean
Fitbit extrapolates your day's calories based on your exercise to that point - so if you don't synch at midnight it may end up 'taking some away' .. I assume you did lots of moving around early on and synched then very little after
calories in the gym, enter them as exercise in MFP - (take half the calorie allowance from machines and MFP database though .. they overestimate for many) 800 calories is a huge gym burn and I'd be wary of that high a number
Make sure your goals, time zones are set the same on fitbit and MFP and your stride length is set on fitbit
Don't worry fitbit gets more accurate over time0 -
pinkteapot3 wrote: »Yesterday I went to bed with 319 calories in the green. This morning I woke up to 81 calories in the red? How do I "lose" calories?? I earned almost 800 going to the gym yesterday.
Each day is a new day!
You can't carry calories forward from one day to the next. You should have eaten those 319 yesterday.
You get your normal daily allowance fresh today and can then earn cals.
That's the way MFP works. In reality of course, weight loss can work with a bit of carry-forward or back. Weight Watchers lets you use more or less cals each day so long as you're on goal for the week (ie you can't carry anything forward to next week, or save up for a month to have a massive binge!). I usually go over my cals on MFP on a Friday and am under on a Saturday, and that evens out for me.
Eating your exercise cals - in theory, yes. I eat all of my cals that I earn through exercise and the system works for me. It is intended that you eat any you earn.
However, you'll get a lot of replies saying you should only eat half of them as MFP over-estimates calories. Everyone's different and you have to find what works for you.
I would start by eating them all, give it 4 weeks, and see if you've lost weight. If you eat them all you won't feel too hungry.
However, if you're the sort who'll give up if you don't see a loss, start by eating half and if you lose too quickly then eat more of them.
That's not true - you can follow the weekly reports, best on the app.
I always track my calories weekly and it doesn't matter if I go over one day and under the next as long as my rolling 7 days is at goal calories
lots of us do it that way to great success.
There is no way on earth I would eat 800 calories for a gym workout - to put it in perspective that kind of burn would take me (at 5'8 and 162lbs) 70 mins straight cardio with HR at 155-160.
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I had the same problem of mfp taking away calories that I had already earned and eaten, putting me in the red. It's horrible to go to bed in the green and waking up in the red. My solution was to disconnect my fit bit from my mfp account. I enter all my exercise manually from my heart rate monitor now.0
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pinkteapot3 wrote: »Yesterday I went to bed with 319 calories in the green. This morning I woke up to 81 calories in the red? How do I "lose" calories?? I earned almost 800 going to the gym yesterday.
Each day is a new day!
You can't carry calories forward from one day to the next. You should have eaten those 319 yesterday.
You get your normal daily allowance fresh today and can then earn cals.
That's the way MFP works. In reality of course, weight loss can work with a bit of carry-forward or back. Weight Watchers lets you use more or less cals each day so long as you're on goal for the week (ie you can't carry anything forward to next week, or save up for a month to have a massive binge!). I usually go over my cals on MFP on a Friday and am under on a Saturday, and that evens out for me.
Eating your exercise cals - in theory, yes. I eat all of my cals that I earn through exercise and the system works for me. It is intended that you eat any you earn.
However, you'll get a lot of replies saying you should only eat half of them as MFP over-estimates calories. Everyone's different and you have to find what works for you.
I would start by eating them all, give it 4 weeks, and see if you've lost weight. If you eat them all you won't feel too hungry.
However, if you're the sort who'll give up if you don't see a loss, start by eating half and if you lose too quickly then eat more of them.
That's not true - you can follow the weekly reports, best on the app.
I always track my calories weekly and it doesn't matter if I go over one day and under the next as long as my rolling 7 days is at goal calories
lots of us do it that way to great success.
There is no way on earth I would eat 800 calories for a gym workout - to put it in perspective that kind of burn would take me (at 5'8 and 162lbs) 70 mins straight cardio with HR at 155-160.
She does then say "In reality of course, weight loss can work with a bit of carry-forward or back." I think when she said you can't carry them forward she was talking purely about how MFP works, in that if you have 200 calories left over one day you can't tell MFP to add them to the next day's goals - you have to been 200 in the green one day then 200 in the red the next if you want to carry them over.
In response to the OP, I've also had the problem before where I've been in the green when I've gone to bed, then when I've looked back on that day the next morning it's been in the red and has 'removed' calories, even though I have it synced almost constantly as it syncs with my phone. I usually try to leave it around 100 calories in the green to allow for that, though I don't always manage to! It's annoying, and I'd rather my Fitbit just added on the extra calories it knows I've already burnt over the activity level I've provided, but I don't know if there's a way of doing that.0 -
This is more of a FitBit thing than a MFP thing, since all MFP does is record the information FitBit sends to it. It appears to me that FitBit keeps a running average and extrapolates that for the rest of the day. Since you don't burn many calories when you are sleeping, you end up burning fewer calories than it thought you would. Once it reports that to MFP, MFP will show that you ate more than you burned.0
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DemoraFairy wrote: »pinkteapot3 wrote: »Yesterday I went to bed with 319 calories in the green. This morning I woke up to 81 calories in the red? How do I "lose" calories?? I earned almost 800 going to the gym yesterday.
Each day is a new day!
You can't carry calories forward from one day to the next. You should have eaten those 319 yesterday.
You get your normal daily allowance fresh today and can then earn cals.
That's the way MFP works. In reality of course, weight loss can work with a bit of carry-forward or back. Weight Watchers lets you use more or less cals each day so long as you're on goal for the week (ie you can't carry anything forward to next week, or save up for a month to have a massive binge!). I usually go over my cals on MFP on a Friday and am under on a Saturday, and that evens out for me.
Eating your exercise cals - in theory, yes. I eat all of my cals that I earn through exercise and the system works for me. It is intended that you eat any you earn.
However, you'll get a lot of replies saying you should only eat half of them as MFP over-estimates calories. Everyone's different and you have to find what works for you.
I would start by eating them all, give it 4 weeks, and see if you've lost weight. If you eat them all you won't feel too hungry.
However, if you're the sort who'll give up if you don't see a loss, start by eating half and if you lose too quickly then eat more of them.
That's not true - you can follow the weekly reports, best on the app.
I always track my calories weekly and it doesn't matter if I go over one day and under the next as long as my rolling 7 days is at goal calories
lots of us do it that way to great success.
There is no way on earth I would eat 800 calories for a gym workout - to put it in perspective that kind of burn would take me (at 5'8 and 162lbs) 70 mins straight cardio with HR at 155-160.
She does then say "In reality of course, weight loss can work with a bit of carry-forward or back." I think when she said you can't carry them forward she was talking purely about how MFP works, in that if you have 200 calories left over one day you can't tell MFP to add them to the next day's goals - you have to been 200 in the green one day then 200 in the red the next if you want to carry them over.
Yes, apologies for any confusion. There is the weekly chart in the app, but day-to-day MFP will reset every day, and show you how many over/under you are that day.
I did also then say that I usually go over my cals on a Friday and under on a Saturday and it's working for me.
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If you go into mfp diary settings to can remove (or activate, I can't remember!) Negative adjustments.0
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Karen_libert wrote: »If you go into mfp diary settings to can remove (or activate, I can't remember!) Negative adjustments.
The way I've always understood it (and I've never felt like I've fully understood it so this may be completely wrong!) negative adjustments is when you give MFP an activity level, MFP calculates how many calories you should burn in an average day, then Fitbit says you've burnt less so MFP reduces the amount of calories you have. So for example, if you say you've got a really active lifestyle, so if you're a builder or something and most days you're walking round, carrying and lifting stuff all day, then MFP will give you a daily estimate based on that. Then if on a day off you sit and do nothing all day, Fitbit will know this and, with negative adjustments enabled, MFP will reduce your calories for that day as you haven't been as active that day as it expected you to be, so you'll end up with a goal lower than your regular daily calories.
The problem we're talking about is when Fitbit adds calories because you've been more active than it was expecting in the morning and it's thought you were going to carry on being that active during the day, but you haven't. For example, you may have set your activity level on MFP to sedentary, then done 10,000 steps in the morning which would give you back some calories as that's over a sedentary activity level, and it's assumed you were going to do another 10,000 steps in the afternoon so it's added those calories on, but instead you've sat on the sofa and done nothing for the rest of the day. Then it's only known at midnight that you've actually done nothing so it's had to remove those extra calories that it added when it thought you were going to carry on being active (but you've still got the calories that it added from your 10,000 steps in the morning, so you're still given more calories your usual daily amount, just not as many more as initially said).
This is how I understand it to be, at least. If this is wrong, someone please correct me!0 -
Thanks for all the feedback. It certainly has helped me understand the connection between the two. I'm not surprised at the number of calories burned from the gym as I was in an intense, 60 minute spinning class. Given that I'm trying to lose the weight, thus not skinny, it was certainly productive.
I guess I'm still concerned about whether or not to eat ALL the calories that MFP allots me in a day......0 -
I guess I'm still concerned about whether or not to eat ALL the calories that MFP allots me in a day......
If you're not talking about added exercise calories, you should try to eat all of your base calorie allowance for the day. Going under the odd day won't hurt you but don't make a habit of it. It's a goal, not a limit.
Eating back all your exercise calories is another matter as many people will eat less than the estimated burn (as mentioned), but you should eat some back if not all of them.0 -
None of what this site tells you is 100% accurate, there's no one size fits all guide for losing weight. This site can give you general guidelines, but tailoring things to suit your unique height/weight/age/gender/etc is down to you. And there's a fair amount of trial and error involved until you find what works for you.0
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I used to have that issue as well. Make sure that your Fitbit and MFP are both set for the same activity level and the same time zone. But as someone else said, you were probably very active earlier in the day. If I'm not mistaken, as time goes by, the Fitbit starts to figure out your average day and estimates things a little better.0
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