Question about TDEE calculator energy levels and logging exercise calories in MFP

matthew1700

Hi everyone,

I've discovered that I've probably been eating too few calories for sustainable weight loss (which explains my months-long plateau), and I've looked through BMR and TDEE calculators to come up with a better calorie goal to hopefully restart my weight loss. If I use tdeecalculator.net, it shows a BMR of a little over 1700 (which is what every other BMR calculator has told me, and I've been eating only 1500-1600 calories for months.), and it shows these calorie levels depending on activity level:


This is where I get confused. I try to exercise 4-5 days a week, so based on the calculator, I would choose the moderate exercise calorie level and subtract 20-25% to find my deficit. However, I want to be able to track my exercise on MFP using the number of calories burnt that my Fitbit Charge HR tells me. If these exercise calories are being added back, should I use the sedentary calorie level? (I'm a student and I spend a good part of the day sitting.) That way, it would be a baseline and I would be adding the calories I burn?

middlehaitch

If you are using a Fitbit to track your calories the easiest thing to do is use the deficit MFP gives you.
MFP calculates your deficit without exercise - NEAT.

A TDEE calculator includes exercise. You could use it with a sedentary setting, no exercise, but why use an off site calculator when that is what MFP does.

Cheers, h.

kshama2001

matthew1700 wrote: »

Hi everyone,

I've discovered that I've probably been eating too few calories for sustainable weight loss (which explains my months-long plateau), and I've looked through BMR and TDEE calculators to come up with a better calorie goal to hopefully restart my weight loss. If I use tdeecalculator.net, it shows a BMR of a little over 1700 (which is what every other BMR calculator has told me, and I've been eating only 1500-1600 calories for months.), and it shows these calorie levels depending on activity level:

This is where I get confused. I try to exercise 4-5 days a week, so based on the calculator, I would choose the moderate exercise calorie level and subtract 20-25% to find my deficit. However, I want to be able to track my exercise on MFP using the number of calories burnt that my Fitbit Charge HR tells me. If these exercise calories are being added back, should I use the sedentary calorie level? (I'm a student and I spend a good part of the day sitting.) That way, it would be a baseline and I would be adding the calories I burn?

Yes, use Sedentary and let your FitBit give you exercise calories.

However, you're not in a plateau due to too few calories. The most common cause for a plateau is underestimating calories eaten due to inaccurate logging. Please change your Diary Sharing settings to Public: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/account/diary_settings

pmm3437

I always recommend calculating for Sed.

You can then add back a % of exercise calories expended based on anticipated accuracy.

Colorscheme

The fitbit app on the phone goes by TDEE, MFP uses NEAT. I enabled negative calorie adjustment and set MFP to sedentary. Seems to work fine for me. So at the end of the day when I look at my Fibit app, I can get my calorie deficit by TDEE - Calories eaten.

matthew1700

Thank you all so much