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Fitbit Walking Calorie Burn Estimate
Replies
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Christine_72 wrote: »Christine_72 wrote: »Does this look accurate to anyone? For this, i got an extra 1,158 calories transferred over to mfp
Your day looks a lot like mine (my stats: 5'6" 21 year old female, about 130ish lbs).
Do you have your fitbit synced to mfp @abatonfan ? What activity level did you choose?
I agree, very similar. I'm 5'8, 147lbs age 44. I also should add that i reduced my stride length and height by 3 inches on fitbit.
I do. I have mine set to below sedentary, because I hate having the negative calorie adjustments. For a goal of maintaining my weight, my calorie goal before syncing my Fitbit is 1550 calories (regular sedentary would be about 1700 for me, if I'm remembering correctly). If Fitbit is synced, I need to take about 3000-4000 steps in order to get MFP to register my calorie goal as 1550 (otherwise, I get about a 150-200 negative calorie adjustment if I took 0 steps).
Ha that's why i changed back to sedentary from lightly active. I always lost a couple hundred calories in the evening, and i hated being in the negative when i didn't get enough steps in, It put too much pressure on me, and i had to work extra hard in the morning to get out of the red (i prelog my day), i guess it was a mind game thing.1 -
Well according to fitbit a couple days ago I should have eaten 5900 calories in order to be sticking with my goal of one pound weight loss per week. Needless to say I did not in fact eat 5900 calories nor could I imagine doing so.
Correct me if I am interpreting its readout incorrectly but it is saying my TDEE for that day was 6461 calories right?
So you can understand my skepticism when the thing on my wrist suggests I should be eating at least 12 big macs a day.
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So today I just let myself go on eating just to see. I had a very large bowl of granola with whole milk and chocolate powder, a quarter cup of almonds, two full packages of beef jerky and a some dried fruit, shared a mini blizzard from Dairy Queen plus their Iced Mocha coffee. I had a monster taco and a jumbo jack from jack in the box. I had a 4-item combo from Panda express. According to fitbit I am still almost 2000 calories below my TDEE for intake.
So I can eat like that and lose 4 pounds a week? I call B.S. on that.2 -
Aaron_K123 wrote: »So today I just let myself go on eating just to see. I had a very large bowl of granola with whole milk and chocolate powder, a quarter cup of almonds, two full packages of beef jerky and a some dried fruit, shared a mini blizzard from Dairy Queen plus their Iced Mocha coffee. I had a monster taco and a jumbo jack from jack in the box. I had a 4-item combo from Panda express. According to fitbit I am still almost 2000 calories below my TDEE for intake.
So I can eat like that and lose 4 pounds a week? I call B.S. on that.
The picture you posted prior to this post, that is a HIGH level of activity. That is way beyond Sedentary, Lightly Active or even Active. I scrolled through this post again and I don't see where you listed your height and weight so that I can tell you if this is a reasonable TDEE. However, I will say again that I am a woman, 5'3.5" and 108 pounds and my TDEE is 2000 to 2400 calories per day. On a lazy day, for me, my TDEE is around 1800. I have been eating 2000+ calories per day for a while now and have yet to gain weight. The one day I managed to get 44,411 steps my TDEE was 3,354 calories. I ate around 2900 calories that day because I was too tired to eat anything else.
The reason I quoted your second post is because of all the stuff you said you ate. Herein lies the issue; there is very little calorie accuracy there. There is no way to know the accurate calorie count in half of the stuff you ate. I weigh all of my food, so I know exactly what I'm eating aside from label rounding. I know 28 grams of the almonds I eat are 160 calories, so when I want almonds I weigh out the amount in grams. You say you had a "quarter cup". Even though that's the serving on the label, your version of a quarter cup could vary wildly from an actual serving of almonds. You could have easily had 300 calories of almonds, but logged it as 160 calories by using a measuring cup. Whatever the nutritional information for a mini blizzard, iced mocha, monster taco, jumbo jack and a 4-item combo are on their respective websites, they can and usually do vary greatly depending on who prepared them. So yeah, if you're going to eat like that, you definitely should leave calorie padding and not eat back every single calorie Fitbit is giving you. Also, you shouldn't just let yourself go on eating either; you should eat when you're actually hungry.3 -
Aaron_K123 wrote: »Well according to fitbit a couple days ago I should have eaten 5900 calories in order to be sticking with my goal of one pound weight loss per week. Needless to say I did not in fact eat 5900 calories nor could I imagine doing so.
Correct me if I am interpreting its readout incorrectly but it is saying my TDEE for that day was 6461 calories right?
So you can understand my skepticism when the thing on my wrist suggests I should be eating at least 12 big macs a day.
With that high of an activity level you may be an outlier for whom the algorithms aren't accurate. It's really hard for any of us to say with certainty. I understand your skepticism but all we can do is share our personal experiences and for the vast majority of people, FitBit is a relatively accurate predictor of total calorie burn and linking the tool with MFP enables us to meet our weight loss or maintenance goals.
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Aaron_K123 wrote: »So today I just let myself go on eating just to see. I had a very large bowl of granola with whole milk and chocolate powder, a quarter cup of almonds, two full packages of beef jerky and a some dried fruit, shared a mini blizzard from Dairy Queen plus their Iced Mocha coffee. I had a monster taco and a jumbo jack from jack in the box. I had a 4-item combo from Panda express. According to fitbit I am still almost 2000 calories below my TDEE for intake.
So I can eat like that and lose 4 pounds a week? I call B.S. on that.
I'm not sure who you are calling BS to... The people responding in this thread trying to give you helpful advice from our own personal experience?3 -
From my own data (2 years worth) I think Fitbit can be trusted when activity is in the neighborhood of around 10,000 steps (non-rigorous). I feel it underestimates burn if I'm not active, and progressively overestimates (and gets more and more ridiculous in its estimates) if I'm more active than that.
I log accurately, to the gram and don't eat out very often. And I do without apology blame the tool for telling me my TDEE is in the neighborhood of 3000 calories and that I'd need to eat that much to maintain my weight when that's not at all so for me, and I suspect for most other people with my stats. (I.e. I'm not special)
I do however blame myself for eating that much despite knowing darn well from years of data that, like Christine said, I would have hit my goal ages ago if Fitbit burns reflected reality. But not everyone has years of data to inform them that high Fitbit burns are, very probably, complete BS.2 -
Lourdesong wrote: »From my own data (2 years worth) I think Fitbit can be trusted when activity is in the neighborhood of around 10,000 steps (non-rigorous). I feel it underestimates burn if I'm not active, and progressively overestimates (and gets more and more ridiculous in its estimates) if I'm more active than that.
I log accurately, to the gram and don't eat out very often. And I do without apology blame the tool for telling me my TDEE is in the neighborhood of 3000 calories and that I'd need to eat that much to maintain my weight when that's not at all so for me, and I suspect for most other people with my stats. (I.e. I'm not special)
I do however blame myself for eating that much despite knowing darn well from years of data that, like Christine said, I would have hit my goal ages ago if Fitbit burns reflected reality. But not everyone has years of data to inform them that high Fitbit burns are, very probably, complete BS.
This is fair. My step count is in the 15k range usually and it's been pretty accurate for me but on rare days where I've exceeded 25k I have seen some high adjustments. Since they are a rarity for me I happily enjoy the 3000 cals and didn't see any negative issues but if it were common I might be more skeptical.
I do think one has to build their own data set over time in order to determine how implicitly to trust this tool. Just like with any new technology it takes getting used to. I also think it is important to have an activity setting in MFP that aligns with your true activity setting. I personally don't understand why people who average 20k or more steps would keep themselves set at sedentary, then question why the adjustments are so huge. I know it's personal preference and at the end of the day, the total numbers should align, but getting my activity level on MFP correlated to what my Fitbit says I burn from a step perspective was key for me in being able to trust the numbers I see on both systems.1 -
WinoGelato wrote: »Aaron_K123 wrote: »So today I just let myself go on eating just to see. I had a very large bowl of granola with whole milk and chocolate powder, a quarter cup of almonds, two full packages of beef jerky and a some dried fruit, shared a mini blizzard from Dairy Queen plus their Iced Mocha coffee. I had a monster taco and a jumbo jack from jack in the box. I had a 4-item combo from Panda express. According to fitbit I am still almost 2000 calories below my TDEE for intake.
So I can eat like that and lose 4 pounds a week? I call B.S. on that.
I'm not sure who you are calling BS to... The people responding in this thread trying to give you helpful advice from our own personal experience?
No no, calling BS to my fitbit TDEE measure, I appreciate the time people have taken to comment and apologize to you if you thought I was calling BS on one of your comments.1 -
Here's my two cents - step tracking cannot measure calorie burn, period. What Fitbit's system does is build an estimate based upon some typical averages. Aaron, if you're consistently getting in 20K or 40K in steps every day then you're obviously an active individual who spends most of your day on your feet. And based on your profile photo and that step range I'm going to guess you're a pretty fit individual. You are not average.
When someone has a high level of fitness their body is efficient at using energy. For example, someone who is just starting out with running who goes out for a 3 mile jog at a 10 minute mile pace is going to have a pretty high heart rate, fairly close to their max, throughout the run. An experienced runner running at that same pace will have a much, much lower heart rate. Both are doing exactly the same amount of work (assuming similar gait, body weight, muscle mass, etc.), but the more experienced runner has, through practice and training, gotten more efficient at using oxygen (which is what calorie burn is all about). So, same distance, same pace, but the first runner's body is working harder to accomplish the same thing.
There is no way for the Fitbit algorithm to take into account overall fitness level for two people of the same age, height and weight, or to measure any of that. So, while your average human walking 45K steps in a day might have burned the calories the Fitbit app gave you, someone of your fitness level would naturally burn many fewer calories doing that same amount of effort. It's like the difference between two cars that you can see any time you go auto shopping. A Toyota Camry gets 27 mpg and a Chevy Malibu gets 30 mpg. Similar size cars with roughly equivalent engines, but one is slightly more efficient than the other. (Which gets to another point - Fitbit cannot account for genetic, inherited differences between the "engines" in two similar individuals.)
Part of the problem here is that there is actually no way, outside of a laboratory environment, to measure the oxygen use efficiency of an individual, and oxygen use efficiency is the only true measure of calorie expenditure. Steps won't do it and heart rate won't do it. So, someone might ask, why do Fitbits, heart rate monitors and gadgets at the gym give you calorie burn estimates? Because having a baseline to measure against helps to track progress. It doesn't matter if that baseline is accurate, it just needs to be consistent.
Another part of the problem is that people, mostly well meaning types, talk about calorie intake as if you can measure that accurately outside of a lab. You can't. The closest you can get is using a food scale (which, by the way, you should do, but only if you're not the type who becomes demented and obsessed about stuff, because it can turn unhealthy really quickly if that's the case), but even that is still just an estimate based upon averages. When lab studies have been done on both packaged and whole foods the actual calorie counts have between anywhere between 10 to 30 percent off. And then your gut gets into the action. The health and quality of your gut flora determines absorption rates of the food you take in, along with a bunch of other factors. Just like oxygen use efficiency, some people are very efficient at digesting and absorbing nutrients and others are very bad at it. And this can be variable down to the macro nutrient level, with some folks being inefficient at absorbing proteins, and others being inefficient at absorbing fats and so on down the line and vice versa.
So why do we bother? Because, again, having something to measure helps to track progress, so long as the system you're using is consistent. This is why you see fitness models posting their elaborate container systems they use to do their weekly food prep. Which containers you use don't matter. It matters that you use the same ones and stay consistent with what you put in them.
(Wow, this is a lot more than two cents, but I'm on a roll - yay, coffee!)
Finally, the debate about whether or not someone should eat back their exercise expended calories is one I've waded into over and over again over the years. There's a few things to consider before deciding what you need to do, and the first among these is to be clear what your goals are. If your goal is fat loss/weight loss, then in order to make that happen you have to be in a caloric deficit, period. In order to lose fat/weight you must consume fewer calories than you burn. The laws of thermodynamics don't bend to the wishes and fantasies of the masses. You can do that by eating fewer calories or increasing your burn rate through increased activity, but trying to do it via the latter method is much, much more difficult and time consuming than using the former. A total couch potato who begins to exercise and also goes from 3000 steps a day to 10,000 is going to create a big deficit via increased activity. But this same person, as their overall fitness level increases and their body adjusts to this new activity being the norm will plateau. So, early on if she eats back some or all of those expended calories will lose weight, but if she keeps eating them back she'll hit a brick wall.
Now, if your objective is to build muscle mass and strength, and you don't care what the number on the scale says, eating them back is probably a good idea, provided you watch your macros. You don't want to eat them back in the form of sugar and french fries. But this is really only for athletes and body builders. If you're doing 10K steps a day and doing a moderate gym workout for 30 to 40 minutes a day I wouldn't recommend eating back your expended calories as estimated by a Fitbit or MFP.6 -
Lourdesong wrote: »From my own data (2 years worth) I think Fitbit can be trusted when activity is in the neighborhood of around 10,000 steps (non-rigorous). I feel it underestimates burn if I'm not active, and progressively overestimates (and gets more and more ridiculous in its estimates) if I'm more active than that.
I log accurately, to the gram and don't eat out very often. And I do without apology blame the tool for telling me my TDEE is in the neighborhood of 3000 calories and that I'd need to eat that much to maintain my weight when that's not at all so for me, and I suspect for most other people with my stats. (I.e. I'm not special)
I do however blame myself for eating that much despite knowing darn well from years of data that, like Christine said, I would have hit my goal ages ago if Fitbit burns reflected reality. But not everyone has years of data to inform them that high Fitbit burns are, very probably, complete BS.
This was my suspicion as well. Any device like this is going to have an accuracy range and it makes sense that the company would tune their instrument to be most accurate in the ~2000 calorie TDEE range. Outliers to that would be less accurate and the further you get away from that the less accurate it would be.4 -
WinoGelato wrote: »Lourdesong wrote: »From my own data (2 years worth) I think Fitbit can be trusted when activity is in the neighborhood of around 10,000 steps (non-rigorous). I feel it underestimates burn if I'm not active, and progressively overestimates (and gets more and more ridiculous in its estimates) if I'm more active than that.
I log accurately, to the gram and don't eat out very often. And I do without apology blame the tool for telling me my TDEE is in the neighborhood of 3000 calories and that I'd need to eat that much to maintain my weight when that's not at all so for me, and I suspect for most other people with my stats. (I.e. I'm not special)
I do however blame myself for eating that much despite knowing darn well from years of data that, like Christine said, I would have hit my goal ages ago if Fitbit burns reflected reality. But not everyone has years of data to inform them that high Fitbit burns are, very probably, complete BS.
This is fair. My step count is in the 15k range usually and it's been pretty accurate for me but on rare days where I've exceeded 25k I have seen some high adjustments. Since they are a rarity for me I happily enjoy the 3000 cals and didn't see any negative issues but if it were common I might be more skeptical.
I do think one has to build their own data set over time in order to determine how implicitly to trust this tool. Just like with any new technology it takes getting used to. I also think it is important to have an activity setting in MFP that aligns with your true activity setting. I personally don't understand why people who average 20k or more steps would keep themselves set at sedentary, then question why the adjustments are so huge. I know it's personal preference and at the end of the day, the total numbers should align, but getting my activity level on MFP correlated to what my Fitbit says I burn from a step perspective was key for me in being able to trust the numbers I see on both systems.
"I personally don't understand why people who average 20k or more steps would keep themselves set at sedentary, then question why the adjustments are so huge."
Correct me if I am wrong but if you use MFPs activity level (say set it to active) AND you use fitbit sync tracking that you would be double-counting a lot of calorie burn and it would be very inaccurate. If you are going to be using an activity tracker for your caloric burn then you should turn off MFPs activity adjustment shouldn't you? If you instead set yourself to active on MFP then it is going to give you say an 800 calorie extra per day but on top of that you fitbit sync that would then add on top of that and the 800 calories would basically be counted twice.
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Here's my two cents - step tracking cannot measure calorie burn, period. What Fitbit's system does is build an estimate based upon some typical averages. Aaron, if you're consistently getting in 20K or 40K in steps every day then you're obviously an active individual who spends most of your day on your feet. And based on your profile photo and that step range I'm going to guess you're a pretty fit individual. You are not average.
When someone has a high level of fitness their body is efficient at using energy. For example, someone who is just starting out with running who goes out for a 3 mile jog at a 10 minute mile pace is going to have a pretty high heart rate, fairly close to their max, throughout the run. An experienced runner running at that same pace will have a much, much lower heart rate. Both are doing exactly the same amount of work (assuming similar gait, body weight, muscle mass, etc.), but the more experienced runner has, through practice and training, gotten more efficient at using oxygen (which is what calorie burn is all about). So, same distance, same pace, but the first runner's body is working harder to accomplish the same thing.
There is no way for the Fitbit algorithm to take into account overall fitness level for two people of the same age, height and weight, or to measure any of that. So, while your average human walking 45K steps in a day might have burned the calories the Fitbit app gave you, someone of your fitness level would naturally burn many fewer calories doing that same amount of effort. It's like the difference between two cars that you can see any time you go auto shopping. A Toyota Camry gets 27 mpg and a Chevy Malibu gets 30 mpg. Similar size cars with roughly equivalent engines, but one is slightly more efficient than the other. (Which gets to another point - Fitbit cannot account for genetic, inherited differences between the "engines" in two similar individuals.)
Part of the problem here is that there is actually no way, outside of a laboratory environment, to measure the oxygen use efficiency of an individual, and oxygen use efficiency is the only true measure of calorie expenditure. Steps won't do it and heart rate won't do it. So, someone might ask, why do Fitbits, heart rate monitors and gadgets at the gym give you calorie burn estimates? Because having a baseline to measure against helps to track progress. It doesn't matter if that baseline is accurate, it just needs to be consistent.
Another part of the problem is that people, mostly well meaning types, talk about calorie intake as if you can measure that accurately outside of a lab. You can't. The closest you can get is using a food scale (which, by the way, you should do, but only if you're not the type who becomes demented and obsessed about stuff, because it can turn unhealthy really quickly if that's the case), but even that is still just an estimate based upon averages. When lab studies have been done on both packaged and whole foods the actual calorie counts have between anywhere between 10 to 30 percent off. And then your gut gets into the action. The health and quality of your gut flora determines absorption rates of the food you take in, along with a bunch of other factors. Just like oxygen use efficiency, some people are very efficient at digesting and absorbing nutrients and others are very bad at it. And this can be variable down to the macro nutrient level, with some folks being inefficient at absorbing proteins, and others being inefficient at absorbing fats and so on down the line and vice versa.
So why do we bother? Because, again, having something to measure helps to track progress, so long as the system you're using is consistent. This is why you see fitness models posting their elaborate container systems they use to do their weekly food prep. Which containers you use don't matter. It matters that you use the same ones and stay consistent with what you put in them.
(Wow, this is a lot more than two cents, but I'm on a roll - yay, coffee!)
Finally, the debate about whether or not someone should eat back their exercise expended calories is one I've waded into over and over again over the years. There's a few things to consider before deciding what you need to do, and the first among these is to be clear what your goals are. If your goal is fat loss/weight loss, then in order to make that happen you have to be in a caloric deficit, period. In order to lose fat/weight you must consume fewer calories than you burn. The laws of thermodynamics don't bend to the wishes and fantasies of the masses. You can do that by eating fewer calories or increasing your burn rate through increased activity, but trying to do it via the latter method is much, much more difficult and time consuming than using the former. A total couch potato who begins to exercise and also goes from 3000 steps a day to 10,000 is going to create a big deficit via increased activity. But this same person, as their overall fitness level increases and their body adjusts to this new activity being the norm will plateau. So, early on if she eats back some or all of those expended calories will lose weight, but if she keeps eating them back she'll hit a brick wall.
Now, if your objective is to build muscle mass and strength, and you don't care what the number on the scale says, eating them back is probably a good idea, provided you watch your macros. You don't want to eat them back in the form of sugar and french fries. But this is really only for athletes and body builders. If you're doing 10K steps a day and doing a moderate gym workout for 30 to 40 minutes a day I wouldn't recommend eating back your expended calories as estimated by a Fitbit or MFP.
I would agree with this except I have a Fitbit HR Charge which DOES measure heart rate and therefore should be taking into account relative fitness level. In otherwords my heartrate doesn't climb that much if I am just walking and therefore my 2 mile walk I shouldn't burn as much as someone who was not fit walking the same 2 miles who had a much more elevated heart rate. Since the Charge HR is measuring my heart rate it should be taking that into account.
I think ultimately here I just have to be consistant in what I am doing and wait and see what happens over time with my weight and adjust according to reality instead of to what my wrist activity tracker is telling me.
Thanks for your advice and thanks to everyone elses advice as well, it is appreciated.2 -
I see a lot of questions about who I am and what my goals are so I will try to briefly sum that up here.
I am 37 year old male, 6' tall and 175 pounds. I am very small framed so although 175 might sound light for a 6' tall man my lean mass is only around 137 pounds so at 175 I am a bit overweight at the moment. My goal, therefore, is to lose about 20 pounds of fat and get back to being lean.
Those who might gasp at the idea of a 6' tall man being only 155 pounds I assure you with my small frame 155 pounds is a reasonable goal. My profile pictures show me at 180 pounds going down to 155 a few years ago when I was on MFP previously. As you can see I don't look underweight at 155. I've since then put some of that weight back on and am just trying to lose it again now.
That said my ultimate goal is to lose it slowly while retaining my muscle mass (not losing so fast I lose muscle as well) while improving my overall cardiovascular health and fitness.
In otherwords I plan to be very active and eat enough to support that but just enough under to be losing about a pound a week.
I have a deskjob (believe it or not) but I spend every other moment being active both in the morning before work and in the evening after up until bed. My activity curve is a spike from 6:30am to 9:00am followed by a lull then a spike from 5:30pm to 10pm. I got the activity tracker because I figured MFP's "active" setting was too vague and nonspecific and that just selecting an activity and typing in minutes done was not particularly accurate either.1 -
Aaron_K123 wrote: »WinoGelato wrote: »Lourdesong wrote: »From my own data (2 years worth) I think Fitbit can be trusted when activity is in the neighborhood of around 10,000 steps (non-rigorous). I feel it underestimates burn if I'm not active, and progressively overestimates (and gets more and more ridiculous in its estimates) if I'm more active than that.
I log accurately, to the gram and don't eat out very often. And I do without apology blame the tool for telling me my TDEE is in the neighborhood of 3000 calories and that I'd need to eat that much to maintain my weight when that's not at all so for me, and I suspect for most other people with my stats. (I.e. I'm not special)
I do however blame myself for eating that much despite knowing darn well from years of data that, like Christine said, I would have hit my goal ages ago if Fitbit burns reflected reality. But not everyone has years of data to inform them that high Fitbit burns are, very probably, complete BS.
This is fair. My step count is in the 15k range usually and it's been pretty accurate for me but on rare days where I've exceeded 25k I have seen some high adjustments. Since they are a rarity for me I happily enjoy the 3000 cals and didn't see any negative issues but if it were common I might be more skeptical.
I do think one has to build their own data set over time in order to determine how implicitly to trust this tool. Just like with any new technology it takes getting used to. I also think it is important to have an activity setting in MFP that aligns with your true activity setting. I personally don't understand why people who average 20k or more steps would keep themselves set at sedentary, then question why the adjustments are so huge. I know it's personal preference and at the end of the day, the total numbers should align, but getting my activity level on MFP correlated to what my Fitbit says I burn from a step perspective was key for me in being able to trust the numbers I see on both systems.
"I personally don't understand why people who average 20k or more steps would keep themselves set at sedentary, then question why the adjustments are so huge."
Correct me if I am wrong but if you use MFPs activity level (say set it to active) AND you use fitbit sync tracking that you would be double-counting a lot of calorie burn and it would be very inaccurate. If you are going to be using an activity tracker for your caloric burn then you should turn off MFPs activity adjustment shouldn't you? If you instead set yourself to active on MFP then it is going to give you say an 800 calorie extra per day but on top of that you fitbit sync that would then add on top of that and the 800 calories would basically be counted twice.
The way it's supposed to work is to adjust if you exceed your set activity level. So adjustments would kick in sooner on sedentary and you might not get any on active. Negative adjustments will reduce calories on less active days. There shouldn't be double counting if set up properly.
I haven't used a fitbit for ages, but I did it with a variety of activity levels and it worked fine on all of them.2 -
lemurcat12 wrote: »Aaron_K123 wrote: »WinoGelato wrote: »Lourdesong wrote: »From my own data (2 years worth) I think Fitbit can be trusted when activity is in the neighborhood of around 10,000 steps (non-rigorous). I feel it underestimates burn if I'm not active, and progressively overestimates (and gets more and more ridiculous in its estimates) if I'm more active than that.
I log accurately, to the gram and don't eat out very often. And I do without apology blame the tool for telling me my TDEE is in the neighborhood of 3000 calories and that I'd need to eat that much to maintain my weight when that's not at all so for me, and I suspect for most other people with my stats. (I.e. I'm not special)
I do however blame myself for eating that much despite knowing darn well from years of data that, like Christine said, I would have hit my goal ages ago if Fitbit burns reflected reality. But not everyone has years of data to inform them that high Fitbit burns are, very probably, complete BS.
This is fair. My step count is in the 15k range usually and it's been pretty accurate for me but on rare days where I've exceeded 25k I have seen some high adjustments. Since they are a rarity for me I happily enjoy the 3000 cals and didn't see any negative issues but if it were common I might be more skeptical.
I do think one has to build their own data set over time in order to determine how implicitly to trust this tool. Just like with any new technology it takes getting used to. I also think it is important to have an activity setting in MFP that aligns with your true activity setting. I personally don't understand why people who average 20k or more steps would keep themselves set at sedentary, then question why the adjustments are so huge. I know it's personal preference and at the end of the day, the total numbers should align, but getting my activity level on MFP correlated to what my Fitbit says I burn from a step perspective was key for me in being able to trust the numbers I see on both systems.
"I personally don't understand why people who average 20k or more steps would keep themselves set at sedentary, then question why the adjustments are so huge."
Correct me if I am wrong but if you use MFPs activity level (say set it to active) AND you use fitbit sync tracking that you would be double-counting a lot of calorie burn and it would be very inaccurate. If you are going to be using an activity tracker for your caloric burn then you should turn off MFPs activity adjustment shouldn't you? If you instead set yourself to active on MFP then it is going to give you say an 800 calorie extra per day but on top of that you fitbit sync that would then add on top of that and the 800 calories would basically be counted twice.
The way it's supposed to work is to adjust if you exceed your set activity level. So adjustments would kick in sooner on sedentary and you might not get any on active. Negative adjustments will reduce calories on less active days. There shouldn't be double counting if set up properly.
I haven't used a fitbit for ages, but I did it with a variety of activity levels and it worked fine on all of them.
Ah okay, didn't realize it was that "smart"...I guess that is what people mean when they say "negative calories for the day" that always confused me, now it makes more sense. Regardless though if I set it to sedentary but have my activity tracker sync up it should be accurate, as accurate as my activity tracker is anyways.0 -
Yeah, that's a perfectly good way to do it.
Edit: a lot of it is mental. For a smaller woman, if you put in sedentary the baseline calories will be 1200, even at a 1 lb (sometimes even .5 lb) loss rate. If you pretty much always are active enough to hit 1400 or more, it might make sense and encourage eating a more reasonable amount to think of that as the baseline, by putting in lightly active as the activity level. If you don't have issues eating them back before the end of the day understanding that you are being active enough that day, not such an issue.0 -
I am set at sedentary. My FitBit doesn't give me any calories for the first 1,500 steps or so - then I get 100 calories per 2,000 steps.
It is accurate for me. I keep spreadsheets and calculate my TDEE in various ways to ensure my counts are correct. Just my experience...0 -
Aaron_K123 wrote: »
I would agree with this except I have a Fitbit HR Charge which DOES measure heart rate and therefore should be taking into account relative fitness level. In otherwords my heartrate doesn't climb that much if I am just walking and therefore my 2 mile walk I shouldn't burn as much as someone who was not fit walking the same 2 miles who had a much more elevated heart rate. Since the Charge HR is measuring my heart rate it should be taking that into account.
Well, yes and no. You're right, a less fit person's heart rate would be higher doing the same work, but heart rate is only partially related to fitness in the sense that I mean. More on that later.
First, it's important to understand that the Charge HR doesn't do a particularly good job of tracking heart rate. It suffers from the same flaws that all wrist-worn, LED HRMs do - with some skin types it doesn't read well at all (when I compared the Charge HR to a Polar, chest-strap HRM and another Garmin chest-strap HRM it under-counted my heart rate when I was not active [sitting at my desk] by as much as 20 BPM and over-counted my heart rate when I was running or working out by the same amount,) and it suffers from the same problem that all HRMs do - it over estimates calorie burn. The calorie burn number from any HRM is the result of algorithms and charts of averages programmed into the system. Some are better than others (I happen to think Garmin's calculations are better than most - the HRMs built into treadmills and ellipticals at gyms are downright awful), but they're all just estimates.
And here's why - like I said before, there is simply no way to measure actual calorie expenditure outside of a controlled lab environment. Individual heart rates are an indication of the fitness and exercise capacity of their hearts. Some of your heart rate is driven by signals from your body based on your muscles, organs and brain's need for oxygen that your cells require to convert glycogen into energy, but it's not a precise one to one relationship. Even a very, very fit person's heart rate will go up over time due to age, even if their overall fitness and capacity to do an activity hasn't diminished at all. That's because the heart muscle itself has aged and gotten less efficient. It's also due to deterioration in the signaling pathways between the brain and the heart that come with age.
To put this into perspective, your muscles' capacity to do work is not governed by heart rate. It's governed by how efficiently they use the oxygen and fuel (glycogen) available to them, which is referred to by kinesiologists as VO2 Max. Your heart rate and VO2 Max are related, but not closely enough to be able to measure your VO2 Max precisely without hooking you up to a lot of equipment and drawing blood samples before and after a period of exertion. How many calories you burn can only be measured with any precision by measuring your VO2 Max.
Regardless, like you said, ultimately it doesn't matter, so long as what you're measuring is consistent, and the tools you use to measure it are equally consistent. My point is really that it's important to realize the number you get from MFP, or Fitbit or any other sort of online calculator are estimates that are based on averages culled from representative populations, not precise measurements of your actual work.
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Regardless, like you said, ultimately it doesn't matter, so long as what you're measuring is consistent, and the tools you use to measure it are equally consistent. My point is really that it's important to realize the number you get from MFP, or Fitbit or any other sort of online calculator are estimates that are based on averages culled from representative populations, not precise measurements of your actual work.
This exact same principle has to be applied to caloric values as we know them as well, unfortunately. It's all just a guessing game of averages, outside of having a home calorimeter, and being okay with consuming lots of...soup. For example, there's no way you will convince me that the pack of bacon that I bought last week (which at an eyeballed estimate was about 85% fat) was the same caloric value as the pack I bought the week before, which looked closer to about 50% lean, though they were the same brand, and thus, same label.2 -
Aaron_K123 wrote: »WinoGelato wrote: »Aaron_K123 wrote: »So today I just let myself go on eating just to see. I had a very large bowl of granola with whole milk and chocolate powder, a quarter cup of almonds, two full packages of beef jerky and a some dried fruit, shared a mini blizzard from Dairy Queen plus their Iced Mocha coffee. I had a monster taco and a jumbo jack from jack in the box. I had a 4-item combo from Panda express. According to fitbit I am still almost 2000 calories below my TDEE for intake.
So I can eat like that and lose 4 pounds a week? I call B.S. on that.
I'm not sure who you are calling BS to... The people responding in this thread trying to give you helpful advice from our own personal experience?
No no, calling BS to my fitbit TDEE measure, I appreciate the time people have taken to comment and apologize to you if you thought I was calling BS on one of your comments.
In my experience with the fitbit, it vastly overstated my active minutes calories (routinely gave me 175 calories for walking 15 minutes) while understating my sedentary calories. If i stayed within a narrow range (like 7500 -10000) then the numbers it gave me were fairly accurate. However, as I got more and more active the TDEE numbers became increasingly ludicrous so I stopped using my fitbit to measure calories.0 -
My TDEE according to my Fitbit Charge is around 3500. My activity level is set to High and I walk around 15-20k steps on most days and have to lose about 90 pounds. I Do not allow Fitbit to adjust my calorie goal as I did find that it was giving me too much and I was stuck in maintenance. Now that may be because I was missing something in my settings but I tried quite a few different things over a one year period and just had a hard time getting any weight off. Sticking to the number MFP defaults to for my settings is working much better. I do still keep an eye on the Fitbit daily burn to see how it compares and it does seem to come in around 1100-1200 calories above my MFP determined goal. I don't know why the adjustments were so high. I suspect there is some sort of communication problem between the apps.
OP You are off the charts on activity level so would say that your TDEE may well be that high but the adjustments could still be off.
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Gallowmere1984 wrote: »You mentioned hiking. What kind of duration and vigor are we talking here, on the days you see those high burns? Everything I have plugged into, for a six hour hike (not unreasonable in my experience) is showing around 2500 kcals burned for that, even at my height and weight of 5'10", 152 lbs.
I spent about 5 hours hiking 7 miles last Friday, with a ~45 pound backpack. It wound up as 3 recordings:
* 15 minutes to go 0.5 flat miles, 106 cals; I forgot some gear in the car.
* 51 minutes to go 1.6 flattish miles, 319 cals; we stopped here to filter water from the creek, and cool off.
* 4 hours 15 to go 6.6 miles and 1,434 feet of vert, 1,532 cals; most of the hike, we stopped at a good camp.
I really don't know how accurate this is for walking. On flat ground with no pack, I get 100 cal for 0.7 miles.1 -
NorthCascades wrote: »Gallowmere1984 wrote: »You mentioned hiking. What kind of duration and vigor are we talking here, on the days you see those high burns? Everything I have plugged into, for a six hour hike (not unreasonable in my experience) is showing around 2500 kcals burned for that, even at my height and weight of 5'10", 152 lbs.
I spent about 5 hours hiking 7 miles last Friday, with a ~45 pound backpack. It wound up as 3 recordings:
* 15 minutes to go 0.5 flat miles, 106 cals; I forgot some gear in the car.
* 51 minutes to go 1.6 flattish miles, 319 cals; we stopped here to filter water from the creek, and cool off.
* 4 hours 15 to go 6.6 miles and 1,434 feet of vert, 1,532 cals; most of the hike, we stopped at a good camp.
I really don't know how accurate this is for walking. On flat ground with no pack, I get 100 cal for 0.7 miles.
Love the North Cascades, and the Central Cascades, and Rainier...the Olympics also. Guess I just love Washington hiking in general.
My 6.5k calorie day was backpacking around the Goat Rocks area South of Rainier.1 -
Gallowmere1984 wrote: »Regardless, like you said, ultimately it doesn't matter, so long as what you're measuring is consistent, and the tools you use to measure it are equally consistent. My point is really that it's important to realize the number you get from MFP, or Fitbit or any other sort of online calculator are estimates that are based on averages culled from representative populations, not precise measurements of your actual work.
This exact same principle has to be applied to caloric values as we know them as well, unfortunately. It's all just a guessing game of averages, outside of having a home calorimeter, and being okay with consuming lots of...soup. For example, there's no way you will convince me that the pack of bacon that I bought last week (which at an eyeballed estimate was about 85% fat) was the same caloric value as the pack I bought the week before, which looked closer to about 50% lean, though they were the same brand, and thus, same label.
I am aware, and I think you are both correct. Its a matter of time and accurate measurement to get a feel for it and then a matter of more time to reach your goal. In the meantime though I do like nitpicking the hell out of it on forums :-)1 -
I have a charge hr and think it over estimstes the calories i burn. It also over estimates steps as it can record arm movements as steps. One time it showed that I burned about 180 cslories while i was sitting in a train for 1 hour it must have rehistered the trains movement. Another time I spent over an hour sawing timber and did not do much exercise that day and it recorded over 10,000 steps.0
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I count my steps on Shealth. On Sunday, i hiked 3.3 miles at a state park, with an elevation gain of 646 feet. I carried a small daypack with 96 oz water for my dogs and hiking companion, plus my photography gear. Shealth told me that i burned 355 calories.
When I logged it on mfp, they suggested I burned over 600 calories. I suspect Shealth was a good deal more accurate for my hike.
However, on my 34 minute walk this evening, Shealth and MFP estimated within 3 calories of one another.
P.S. I lived on the Olympic Peninsula as a youth. I really miss the hiking there.0 -
I count my steps on Shealth. On Sunday, i hiked 3.3 miles at a state park, with an elevation gain of 646 feet. I carried a small daypack with 96 oz water for my dogs and hiking companion, plus my photography gear. Shealth told me that i burned 355 calories.
When I logged it on mfp, they suggested I burned over 600 calories. I suspect Shealth was a good deal more accurate for my hike.
However, on my 34 minute walk this evening, Shealth and MFP estimated within 3 calories of one another.
P.S. I lived on the Olympic Peninsula as a youth. I really miss the hiking there.
Do you have the Samsung band to sync with Shealth? I'm asking because even though I use a Fitbit for my activities, I use my phone for music on runs and Shealth only registers 6000 steps for a 5 mile run, as well as a mile walk to and from the park. I'm guessing it's because my phone is secured with a band and doesn't make the required amount of movement it would need to count as a "step" in Shealth.0 -
Maxematics wrote: »I count my steps on Shealth. On Sunday, i hiked 3.3 miles at a state park, with an elevation gain of 646 feet. I carried a small daypack with 96 oz water for my dogs and hiking companion, plus my photography gear. Shealth told me that i burned 355 calories.
When I logged it on mfp, they suggested I burned over 600 calories. I suspect Shealth was a good deal more accurate for my hike.
However, on my 34 minute walk this evening, Shealth and MFP estimated within 3 calories of one another.
P.S. I lived on the Olympic Peninsula as a youth. I really miss the hiking there.
Do you have the Samsung band to sync with Shealth? I'm asking because even though I use a Fitbit for my activities, I use my phone for music on runs and Shealth only registers 6000 steps for a 5 mile run, as well as a mile walk to and from the park. I'm guessing it's because my phone is secured with a band and doesn't make the required amount of movement it would need to count as a "step" in Shealth.
I don't have a band. I do have a fairly new phone. My galaxy S7 is right where I'd expect on step counts, but I don't run, ever. I wear it in a bag on my hip. My sister's old Galaxy Note was unreliable for steps running, but the last major Android update fixed that for her. I will have to ask her how the new one is going.0 -
Aaron_K123 wrote: »My 6.5k calorie day was backpacking around the Goat Rocks area South of Rainier.
You know I've never actually made it in there? Last year we set out to backpack to Surprise Lake from Conrad Meadows, but it was when all those fires were burning, the wind shifted and blew a lot of smoke at us, Beth got a migraine, and we had to bail and go home.
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