Exercise calories
AmberGebell
Posts: 113 Member
I just stepped up my cardio to give me a bit more food. So I am doing 45 minutes of walking on treadmill and 25 minutes of circuit training. My total steps for the day yesterday were 16, 826 and Fitbit gave me 826 extra activity calories so I ended up eating 2000 calories yesterday when MFP gives me 1540 a day! I am just wanting to make sure this sounds right? 
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Yes.
When you get a Fitbit adjustment - it is not exactly the same as 'exercise calories' logged for a particular workout.
When you set up MFP and set an activity level, MFP estimates how many calories you will burn in a day. When you use Fitbit, it approximates your calorie burn based on your actual movement. So if you burn more calories according to Fitbit than MFP expected, you earn extra.
Based on your screen grab you burned 847 more than predicted. If you are set for a 1 pound per week weight loss, then MFP expected you to burn 2020 and you actually burned 2867. Largely due to your workouts, but it includes your all day activity.3 -
MFP's eating goal is based on your estimate of NON-exercise daily activity.
So that would be the day with no exercise, and actually being just as active as you selected.
Not only is that rarely going to happen in real life (these are all estimates anyway), but especially on workout days.
So you would rarely be eating that low at 1520.
You do more than was guessed initially - you eat more.
Deficit for weight loss is still there.
Your step count shows just how active you indeed were, that's really good, even if some was purposeful exercise.
Your circuit training may have been a tad inflated calories for a HR-based device, but it was only 25 min of your awake time, and probably an equally small % of total calories burned.
For that workout, if you broke it out, how many calories does Fitbit report.
If it didn't break it out specifically on it's own or by button press, you can go create an Activity Record (not Workout Record) - if you know the start and end times.
It'll take snapshot of the stats for that chunk of time, steps and calorie burn.
You can also name it, and put stats in the notes for review later - like if curious if your weight lifted has increased - which it should over time if doing it right.
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Is everyone eating back all or 50-75%?1
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@heybales what does " breaking it out mean?0
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Depending on device (never saw what device mentioned - kinda required for most discussions) - there may be no separation of a workout from the daily stats.
On those, if you want to know specific distance and calories and steps - you have to manually log an Activity Record with start/stop times.
On others you push a button and the Activity Record is created automatically, some devices guess the type and name it as such.
So there is your workout stats broken out from the daily stats.
An Activity Record is a snapshot of the stats Fitbit saw and came up with.
If you manually created a MFP or Fitbit workout and overwrote those stats - the snapshot of the Activity Record would remain - even though those stats would no longer be in the daily stats since you replaced them.
It confuses some people, you can have a device created Activity Record showing stats you know are inaccurate.
Create your own Workout Record with better stats, and both will be there.
Only the Workout Record is adding to the daily stats.0 -
@heybales it's a charge hr0
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Ah- so you can hit the button if it doesn't start automatically, you can actually select an Activity Record name for the workout by selecting what it is.
Then look on phone after device sync when workout is finished. There's the duration, steps, calories, HR stats, ect for that block of time.
Those are the specific workout stats, displayed outside the day's stats.
Some devices have no button - all you see is the total day's stats.
You'd have no idea what the stats were for a workout.
Unless you do the process I gave for manual Activity Record.
Hence my descriptions being somewhat iffy when I don't know what device is being discussed.
So you may be able to go back and review past workouts and see what the calorie burn was.
That's what to compare for workouts - not whatever the MFP calorie adjustment happens to be.
FYI - here's a history that shows one manually entered Activity Record, and rest manually entered Workout Records. And 2 are for one workout.
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So bottom line, you should record your activity in MyFitnessPal even if you hit your activity button?
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