Fit bit truly accurate with synced with MFP??

jojuvanlaanen

Hi all... Just recently got a fitbit. I love it so far, but I'm concerned with how it's adding calories burned to my total in MFP. Yesterday I did 45 min on the treadmill and it said I burned around 500 calories! Usually I burn around 300. On top of that it's adding calories burned even when i don't work out that day, due to regular daily activity. I'm not sure I like that because it looks like on MFP that I have all these extra calories I can eat, when i know that's not the case. BUT I do like that it automatically tracks in MFP. So... is this truely accurate? Maybe my calories I tracked before the fitbit were INaccurate? And, do you eat your exercise calories??

cwolfman13

It's giving you additional calories for your day to day because your activity per your tracker exceeds the activity level you selected on MFP. What did you do on the treadmill? It may or may not be more or less accurate depending on what you did.

All of these things simply provide an estimate...none of it is gospel.

And yes...MFP is designed to eat back exercise calories...but you need to account for some estimation error and ultimately make adjustments as per what is actually happening over time.

jojuvanlaanen

But.... I mean.... My calorie goal is 1,200. I ate around 1,100... and It said I had like 1,300 exercise calories!! It's also my understanding that MFP counts for your exersize, or daily activity already in your calorie goal? I'm just so confused as to what to do with these fitbit calories! I mean, I've lost weight by sticking around 1,200-1,500 calories, doing what I'm doing now (granted... it's slow going...)... Why should I eat another 1,000 calories just because my fitbit says so? Maybe I really AM not eating enough, and that's why my weight loss has slowed?

janejellyroll

jojuvanlaanen wrote: »

But.... I mean.... My calorie goal is 1,200. I ate around 1,100... and It said I had like 1,300 exercise calories!! It's also my understanding that MFP counts for your exersize, or daily activity already in your calorie goal? I'm just so confused as to what to do with these fitbit calories! I mean, I've lost weight by sticking around 1,200-1,500 calories, doing what I'm doing now (granted... it's slow going...)... Why should I eat another 1,000 calories just because my fitbit says so? Maybe I really AM not eating enough, and that's why my weight loss has slowed?

MFP does account for your daily activity (but not your additional exercise) as part of your calorie goal. The adjustment from Fitbit should only be making up the difference between the activity goal you have chosen in MFP and the activity recorded by your Fitbit (plus any additional intentional exercise it picks up).

Is your Fitbit new? Sometimes it can take a couple of days for it to really get you.

If you don't want to eat all of them (and it does sound like a very high adjustment), then you can just eat a portion.

By the way, not eating enough will potentially compromise your health in other ways but it will not slow down your weight loss. If you're in a deficit, you'll lose weight. If you're losing less than you would expect, you might have something else going on -- like a logging issue.

emmarrgh

My fitness tracker does the same. I set my activity level to Active, but that didn't help, so I might set it to Highly Active. I do 10k steps a day and it gives me 1,600 - 1,700 exercise calories, which is crazy high, as 10k steps seems to be the minimum goal for a lot of people!

cwolfman13

jojuvanlaanen wrote: »

But.... I mean.... My calorie goal is 1,200. I ate around 1,100... and It said I had like 1,300 exercise calories!! It's also my understanding that MFP counts for your exersize, or daily activity already in your calorie goal? I'm just so confused as to what to do with these fitbit calories! I mean, I've lost weight by sticking around 1,200-1,500 calories, doing what I'm doing now (granted... it's slow going...)... Why should I eat another 1,000 calories just because my fitbit says so? Maybe I really AM not eating enough, and that's why my weight loss has slowed?

MFP doesn't account for your exercise in your activity level...that's why there's zero mention of exercise in the descriptors. When you set your exercise goals, that's just for you...it has zero bearing on your calorie targets...play with the app and you'll easily see that.

Your Fitbit is giving you more than just "exercise" calories...it's giving you BMR calories, general activity calories, and exercise calories. It does seem high and like something is off but I don't own one of those things so couldn't tell you.

But look at it this way...if my MFP target to lose 1 Lb per week is 1,900 calories, that means MFP is estimating my NON EXERCISE maintenance requirements to be around 2,400 calories.

On Sundays I usually do a 30 mile ride...I burn around 1200 calories...and I ride a lot in general throughout the week...if I just eat 1900 calories and burn off 1200 that leaves my body a mere 700 calories to work with...considering that I burn around 1700-1800 merely existing, I think you would agree that leaving myself a mere 700 calories would be pretty unhealthy over the long run right?

jojuvanlaanen

Excellent responses. Thank you! While I'm still a little confused, I'm sure after a while it'll all make sense. Today mfp looks like this:. 1,200-938+715=973 left. I know it's low calories eaten, but really....I'm just not hungry! I did an hour of piyo live and Fitbit said I burned 491 calories. That just seems like a lot to me!!

Azchange

I don't eat back exercise calories and have had great results. I always over estimate the amount of food I log so that if I measure poorly then it makes up for it. I eat at quite a large deficit all week so I can have one nice meal on Sunday evenings before getting back to it on Monday's. Don't trust the fitbit calories because it is logging your normal daily activity which is already calculated. Use a BMR calculator to find out how many calories you should be eating, then create a deficit by eating less and exercising more.

bbs721

I think there is a problem with the latest update from 2/14/17. Prior to the update MFP gave me roughly 350 calories for 13,000 steps. Yesterday and today it gave me almost 900 calories for 14,000 steps. In nearly 1000 days of logging I have never gotten more than 400 calories for exercise before yesterday.