Do you trust your calorie adjustment?
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treehouseghost wrote: »I am having a hard time with this too - just got a Charger HR, but had been using MFP and Pacer app for about a year before that. With Pacer I would end up getting around 600 extra calories a day and I am pretty active - I work out and walk on average 25 000 steps a day. With Fitbit I earn over 1000 extra calories; yesterday it seemed to do something really strange and said I earned almost 3000 calories from a 25-minute workout and walking 35 000 steps (28km). At 5'6" and 120 lbs, there is no way that I burned that many calories. One particular walk was just over an hour long and apparently burned almost 600 calories. If that was true, and Pacer had been off all that time then I would have had a way harder time maintaining my weight, which I have done for a while now. So I am pretty disappointed because I thought Fitbit would be more accurate.
Anyone have any ideas for settings I could change? The lightly active/etc. settings on MFP don't help enough. Even if I set MFP to say I want to lose a lb a week (I am just wanting to maintain my weight), it doesn't seem to lower the calories enough. The problem is that FItbit seems to vastly overestimate how many calories I burn.
You walked an hour and burned 600 calories - that's only 10 cal/min - that's not unreasonable if it had any ups and downs to it increasing your HR more than level walking would cause.
Did Pacer take in to account inclines? That added a decent amount of calorie burn above flat walking.
And 35K steps is massive - could easily see 3000 calories.
You also need to use the HR-based for about 2 weeks for accuracy to improve based on your fitness level - that's what several of above comments were saying.0 -
Thanks, Heybales - true that Pacer should be less accurate. I think my concern is that I have maintained my weight for a few months using Pacer and eating about 2000 calories a day (and before that lost weight - have been using it a year). Now if I suddenly start to eat 3000/day how could I possibly be maintaining my weight? 35K steps isn't unusual for me, so I have other days to compare it to, and rarely ate more than 2200/day while still maintaining my weight. So I don't know what to think...0
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But good to know about the accuracy - maybe it will figure itself out in time!0
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After you have a couple weeks (and your fitness level could still fool it, at least in exercise, daily should be step based) - it will be interesting to see what the average TDEE is.
Considering how many people can eat an extreme fad diet and stop losing, increase their calories and not gain, increase again and not gain - it wouldn't shock me at all that you could have raised your calories to 2000 - but that's still short of what the body could burn as potential TDEE, so you didn't gain.
Which would mean your current TDEE (what you eat and don't change weight on) is suppressed compared to what it could be.
If the Fitbit suggested daily maintenance is only a tad higher after a few weeks of adjustments, I'd suggest testing it out by eating about 200 more daily for a couple weeks at a time, then another week of whatever is left.
You'd have to eat 250 calories over true maintenance for 2 weeks straight to slowly gain 1 lb.
And if strength training - not even fat.
If you gain faster or more - then you proved it's water weight - probably because your muscle glycogen stores were not topped off - proving you were still in a diet compared to potential daily burn.0 -
If you gain faster or more - then you proved it's water weight - probably because your muscle glycogen stores were not topped off - proving you were still in a diet compared to potential daily burn.
I am really interested in reading more about this - any articles from reputable sources anyone can recommend?
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You can catch references to those effects in the details of almost any research study on weight loss where they actually do DEXA scan.
Sometimes in the preamble they'll describe doing 3 scans - start, 2 weeks in, end of study 6-8 weeks or whenever it ends. Specifically so they are getting results that take in to account that fact.
Even others that only do start and finish - when you examine tables on fat mass, water weight, and muscle mass, you'll see what is always lost is is water of decent amount.
Also search for 'wedding cake weight gain syndrome" - where the bridal party starves themselves all week to fit in their dresses - eats 1 piece of cake - and gains 3-5 lbs on Sunday - despite the cake weighed all of 12 oz if that.
I've seen blogs in ancient past discuss that phenomenon with study references, or rather, basic physiology references, because it's been known for a long time.
And of course any comments about low carb diets that are honest with big initial water weight drop talk about it too - like this.
https://8fit.com/blog/glycogen-gluconeogenesis-and-water-weight/0
