Fitbit calories are a joke

Jthanmyfitnesspal

Larissa_NY wrote: »

I got so sick of the shrieking red text telling me I had to eat a wildebeest or die that I just tactfully stopped discussing my exercise habit with the tracker.

Hah! That's funny.

jeepinshawn

Jthanmyfitnesspal wrote: »

I hear a lot of disagreement with my premise. I'm surprised. I though a lot of people would agree with me! Although, you can question my intake monitoring, I'm pretty good at that. BTW, I have a Fitbit Charge HR and the accounts are linked for calories and steps.

The problem is that I do a number of workouts that the Fitbit does not track well, including swimming and circuit training. For my leg workouts, I use the the Precor Adaptive Motion Trainer (AMT) and Elliptical trainer at the gym. The Fitbit agrees somewhat with the elliptical, but significantly underestimates the AMT. In all cases, including swimming, I like wearing the fitbit because it tracks my heart rate, which is useful to see later. (I know that Fitbit does not recommend taking it swimming, but it seems to work OK.

The solution (according to what understand from the MFP site) is to enter workouts into your MFP diary using calorie estimates (if available), letting MFP do the estimate otherwise. It is supposed to help if the workout timing is accurate. MFP is then supposed to do the accounting, subtracting the calories from the Fitbit tally. I think this process is imperfect and the total is often too high in my case.

I do not like entering exercise on the fitbit app. I had too many frustrations and gave up.

Finally, I submit the fact that I am tracking steps both with the fitbit and with Samsung "S Health" included with my phone. In every case, the Fitbit estimates far more steps than S Health, typically by around 20%. You can chalk that up to the fact that the Fitbit records a step for certain arm motions in addition to steps. (It counts a few steps even when I'm driving to work.)

Try logging exercise only into fitbit and food only into MFP. The fitbit tracker is substantially more accurate than any step counter that is on your phone. I wouldn't be overly concerned about a few extra steps here and there for a number of reasons:

1. Chances are at some point the fitbit misses a few steps
2. When you are snot moving around fitbit assigns your calorie burn as your BMR, it isn't, you are burning more than your BMR when you are sitting up at a desk and when you are standing upright but not walking.

If it really bothers you then unlink the two and sell your fitbit, but as you can see from the response the vast majority of the people find them to be reasonably accurate.

20yearsyounger

I did a test recently between my fitbit zip and my Garmin vivofit. Even though the steps and activities were roughly the same, the calories provided were on average 300+ more on fitbit than Garmin. The days when my activity was more intense, the estimates were closer. The days I relied solely on walking the estimate was as high as 600 calories apart. Activities were either generated via Garmin and fed to MFP and Fitbit, or they were manually entered via MFP and sent to Garmin and Fitbit. I love the fitbit challenges and conversations with friends but I set my calorie adjustment back to Garmin. I was maintaining just fine before.

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