Help with my diary (FitBit is messing me up!)

arya8

I'm wondering if someone can take a look at my diary and try to explain what's going on. I got a FitBit Charge 2 on Thursday and yesterday was the first day using it. Before I only used MFP and my daily goal calories were 1740ish with about 200 calories burned as exercise. Now, after syncing FitBit with MFP, my daily calorie goal is over 2000 and it's giving me an inflated macros (like 108 grams of protein as my goal). I exercised this morning on my stationary bike and FitBit says I burned 273 calories. But the calorie adjustment on MFP is over 600 (which MFP treats as exercise calories so I'm supposed to eat them back?). I didn't do any other exercise except normal walking around the house and store. I don't feel like I want to eat those 600 calories because from 2 years ago I've been eating between 1500 (with no exercise) and 2000 (with 500 cal exercise) and was losing weight kind of slowly. I'm afraid if I eat over 2000, I won't lose anything. I'm not sure what's going on!

CyberTone

The Fitbit trackers will start out with just your stats and give you estimates based on a generic person of similar stats. These initial estimates will be close, but as the information from your hour-to-hour and day-to-day habits get logged, the Fitbit algorithms will refine those estimates using moving averages.

How long ago did you do the exercise today? If it was just a short time ago, all of those Calories earned will be added right away to MFP because the MFP part of the integration assumes you will continue burning at that rate for the remainder of the day. As the day goes along and you aren't as active, the earned Calorie adjustment should start to decrease. For the first week or so, you will need to leave a cushion of 100 or so Calories for the last couple of hours in the day until the Fitbit collects enough data from your habits to get a better projection.

I would say, for right now, don't eat all of those Calories back. Just note what you did and see if the Calories start going down for the rest of the day.

I have had my Fitbit Charge HR and now Charge 2 for over 18 months and after the initial first few weeks, it has been very accurate.

arya8

CyberTone wrote: »

The Fitbit trackers will start out with just your stats and give you estimates based on a generic person of similar stats. These initial estimates will be close, but as the information from your hour-to-hour and day-to-day habits get logged, the Fitbit algorithms will refine those estimates using moving averages.

How long ago did you do the exercise today? If it was just a short time ago, all of those Calories earned will be added right away to MFP because the MFP part of the integration assumes you will continue burning at that rate for the remainder of the day. As the day goes along and you aren't as active, the earned Calorie adjustment should start to decrease. For the first week or so, you will need to leave a cushion of 100 or so Calories for the last couple of hours in the day until the Fitbit collects enough data from your habits to get a better projection.

I would say, for right now, don't eat all of those Calories back. Just note what you did and see if the Calories start going down for the rest of the day.

I have had my Fitbit Charge HR and now Charge 2 for over 18 months and after the initial first few weeks, it has been very accurate.

Thanks so much for your reply! I exercised this morning at 9am. That kind of makes sense! I'll still make sure I eat about 1700 cals for days like these until FitBit does its thing.

GottaBurnEmAll

Did you read the information in the Fitbit users group about how to adjust your settings for syncing the devices?

arya8

GottaBurnEmAll wrote: »

Did you read the information in the Fitbit users group about how to adjust your settings for syncing the devices?

Yes, I did all that. It's just that I'm getting too many calories left over to eat and I'm not sure if that's correct because on mfp I'd always get less than 2000, depending on exercise.

Ming1951

I don't add back what fitbit tells me I can. I go to my exercise delete the exercise and all goes back to my normal calorie count for the day. But you have to do it a couple times a day.

arya8

Ming1951 wrote: »

I don't add back what fitbit tells me I can. I go to my exercise delete the exercise and all goes back to my normal calorie count for the day. But you have to do it a couple times a day.

I decided to turn off step counting on mfp so it doesn't do the adjustment because it just overestimates so much.