Fitness tracker that allows you to adjust your RMR?

BarbieAS

Does anyone knows of a fitness tracker that allows you to adjust/override your RMR in order to get a more accurate total calorie burn?

I've been a loyal Fitbit user for almost 4 years. I do love the thing, but I've got one major problem - my actual RMR is significantly different from the estimation that Fitbit uses - about 25% off. (This is backed by a RMR test performed by a personal trainer AND a doctor AND my 3+ years of weighed-and-measured-and-complete logging history as compared to my actual rate of weight change. Please trust me, this is just how it is.)

My current options for compensating for this are (a) not sync my accounts and manually enter a Fitbit adjustment based on taking ~75% of my total calories, which is annoying and potentially even more inaccurate since I don't really know how that difference in RMR translates to a difference in TDEE, or (b) adjust my height and/or age in my Fitbit profile to drastically lower my baseline calorie burn and hopefully result in a more accurate burn related to my daily activities, or (c) not use a fitness tracker at all. Option A is annoying and option B results in my miles walked and/or my body fat percentage on my Aria scale and/or my heart rate zones on my Charge HR being really off which is also annoying, and option (c) is just disappointing since I really really like the concept.

So, obviously I'm pretty invested in Fitbit but I'd be willing to change if something out there actually offered a product that I could use accurately.

WalkingAlong

I would be tempted to do (b) and adjust my age because that "220 minus age" estimate they use for HR zones is nowhere near my actual max HR anyway. And the HR data is pretty rough estimates, at least on my tests of a Charge HR worn with a Polar HRM. It was sometimes 60bpm lower on the Charge. And I don't think age has anything to do with your miles walked. I believe that is just steps X stride length, which is height-based by default, plus you can override it (or you could several years ago, last time I used Fitbits). HTH

BarbieAS

Thanks, that does help - that's kind of where I'm at.

Right now, my Fitbit thinks that I'm 99 years old, and I still needed to shave 4 inches off my real height to get to a place where I felt like it might be what I wanted. I set my own custom HR zone so that's ok, but my stride is still wrong (it won't let me enter my real one as an override; it tells me it's too high and can't be higher than XX inches) and so my miles are off, plus my body fat on my Aria scale is still significantly off (I know that it's not exact anyway, but it's probably a good general idea - at least I can still see trends, kind of). So it's better but still not ideal. It's better than the time period where, based on a spreadsheet some genius here put together where you can enter your RMR and it will tell you how to adjust your height to accommodate that, my Fitbit thought I was 3 feet 3.5 inches tall (I'm more than 2 feet taller than that).

But, I still don't feel really confident that I'm getting good numbers...not that it's going to be perfect in any case, and that's fine, I don't expect perfection, but....I feel like the more I futz with it and try to game the system the more I'm risking just making it worse. Plus, I can't use my Fitbit the way that I really want to and I can't get the most of it - I was just trying to figure out if there was a tracker out there that I could use the way that it was meant to be used and have good stats and all that.

kuranda10

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BarbieAS

kuranda10 wrote: »

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It does. But for purposes of my question, it's totally irrelevant. A 25% reduction in RMR is generally going to translate to approximately the same reduction in BMR, such that you could easily come up with an approximation of BMR that is far more accurate than the one that Fitbit uses if you have (more) accurate RMR numbers.

ETA: obviously I started to respond to what this poster deleted while I was typing, I'm not talking to myself. .

WalkingAlong

As far as I know they all use the same population averages. It's tough if you're not near the average. But if you can back out just trends from your data, that's useful.

I mainly found the Fitbits useful to motivate me to move more, so most often just focused on steps goals. The TDEEs it spit it out for me were more discouraging than anything. They would say I would burn like 1300 calories on sedentary days. I'm sure they program them so that activity counts more than it does in real life to be motivating but it can also be demotivating to see such low estimates.

BarbieAS

WalkingAlong wrote: »

As far as I know they all use the same population averages. It's tough if you're not near the average. But if you can back out just trends from your data, that's useful.

I mainly found the Fitbits useful to motivate me to move more, so most often just focused on steps goals. The TDEEs it spit it out for me were more discouraging than anything. They would say I would burn like 1300 calories on sedentary days. I'm sure they program them so that activity counts more than it does in real life to be motivating but it can also be demotivating to see such low estimates.

Yep. For me, it's totally demotivating when I look at trends over several weeks comparing my Fitbit to my logging and it says I "should" have lost 9 or 10 pounds over 6 weeks and really I gained a pound. And it's not just a one-time fluctuation, that's an ongoing trend. Even adjusting my Fitbit settings doesn't totally correct it.

I'm not complaining that Fitbit doesn't do what I want it to do (though that would be ideal). It is still motivating in certain ways, and I know how they make their estimations and why they do it that way. I was just wondering if there was a different tracker that WOULD do what I wanted it to do. It's hard to figure that stuff out just by Googling because I feel like that's a feature that isn't going to get a ton of press plus there are SO many out there these days (I did spend awhile looking earlier).