Fitbit question
mjj79
Posts: 415 Member
Those who use fotnits, do you eat back your cals earned? I'm talking just normal activity cals earned, not from official exercise. If you do, are you still consistently losing?
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I am in maintenance, but I ate most of my fitbit adjustment when I was losing.3
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I don't normally unless I have a very active day.1
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Lol. Just realized my typo. "Fitbit "
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Those who use fitbits, do you eat back your cals earned? I'm talking just normal activity cals earned, not from official exercise. If you do, are you still consistently losing?
Yes, and yes.
I get a lot of activity calories. If I didn't eat back any of them, I would be massively undereating. If somebody's only getting 100-200 per day, it wouldn't matter as much.2 -
Those who use fotnits, do you eat back your cals earned? I'm talking just normal activity cals earned, not from official exercise. If you do, are you still consistently losing?
I want to use a fotnit. Whatever it is, I want it.
I just got a Fitbit 3 weeks ago. I've been eating according to the adjustments that it gives MFP and it seems to be on par with my weight loss! Only time will tell.2 -
Eat the cals... they're delicious. Evaluate your rate of loss after 4-6 weeks. Adjust based on your actual vs expected results on the basis of your logging and trending weight. if you're using Fitbit you can connect your account with trendweight.com to see what your weight trend is doing over time. I would love to have a Fotnit. And I'm definitely IN for Christine's Titbit
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I eat some. I'm losing more than my weekly target, so I could definitely eat more of them.1
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Kinda have to. 22k steps is a LOT of calories and I'd be starving if I didn't.3
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I do not eat back my fitbit calories. I only walk I try for the 10,000 steps per day but only about 2 miles of those are active, the rest is just normal activity. If I did active exercise on a regular basis I'd probably eat 1/2 back if I was continuing to lose.2
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I don't eat back my calories. Extra calories available = a win in my book. I'm pretty sure calories left is how we lose weight.2
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phyllis731 wrote: »I don't eat back my calories. Extra calories available = a win in my book. I'm pretty sure calories left is how we lose weight.
Except, if you're using mfp as intended, you already have a deficit built in and not eating exercise calories could put you into too big of a deficit which is unhealthy.
Plus, more food! I've always eaten my exercise calories back and I'm down 125 lbs.4 -
phyllis731 wrote: »I don't eat back my calories. Extra calories available = a win in my book. I'm pretty sure calories left is how we lose weight.
Nope. Your Mfp goal already has your deficit built into it. You don't have to leave calories on the table.
OP I've always eaten back most if my Fitbit calories and have lost/ maintained as expected. Having said that, exercise calories can be hard to determine, so you could start off eating back half and adjust after a few weeks based on how you feel and what the scale is doing.3 -
I eat them all and it makes me happy!2
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On the days I have a deficit of 1000+ cals, I eat about half back because I don't know how much I really burn. When I have a 300-400 cal deficit, I don't eat any back.5
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I accidentally underate by not eating them, and lost more muscle than I needed to. If you are a pretty tight logger, eat them back and see what happens in a couple of months.2
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I eat half of them back , if I'm honest and accurate with my tracking I still loose the 1lb a week I'm aiming for and sometimes a little more.1
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phyllis731 wrote: »I don't eat back my calories. Extra calories available = a win in my book. I'm pretty sure calories left is how we lose weight.
Except, if you're using mfp as intended, you already have a deficit built in and not eating exercise calories could put you into too big of a deficit which is unhealthy.
Plus, more food! I've always eaten my exercise calories back and I'm down 125 lbs.
I'm going to Agee with this.
Yesterday I did a 3.5 mile hike. I earned 500 adjusted calories. I ate 1200 my mfp calorie goal which gave me a net of only 700 calories. That's too low.
Unfortunately I don't eat breakfast and my hike was just before dinner so I had a 1200 calorie dinner and I couldn't eat a morsel more. But that was one day and I'm ok with it but I would not do this with any regularity and it just helps me to see that I have to plan better by taking a snack with me.
Having said that I usually eat some if not all of my Fitbit calorie adjustment. I'm just off a diet break so we will see how accurate it is for me. I was able to maintain for 2 months eating the adjusted calories.2 -
Most people here eat them and still lose. However for me Fitbit overestimates my daily burns by about 350cal per day (from normal activity including walking). So the first month after I bought it I ate by it and gained.
But like I said most people seem to have no such issues.2 -
I eat most of them back. I've lost weight just fine.1
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Exceeding one's correctly selected goal is not always a good thing.
To achieve one's goals as set by MFP one eats back their exercise calories.
A Fitbit exercise adjustment does not pertain to any specific exercise, should not be really called an exercise adjustment, and whether accurate or not, the accuracy is not affected by "MFP overestimates exercise" issues".
It is an accounting adjustment to equalize what MFP expected you to have burned by the end of the day based on your logging, and what your Fitbit has recorded as your burn by the end of the day. At midnight.
It can be rendered less accurate when you enter exercise activity manually on MFP. Manual MFP activities push through and overwrites what your Fitbit detects during that time frame.
Prudent loggers will either only record food in MFP and exercise on Fitbit, or will go to the Fitbit website and delete any activities that are imported from MFP.
That way your Fitbit will give you it's own unadulterated estimate of your daily burn.
MFP and Fitbit use the same base formula to calculate your BMR, and in general, if your logging is accurate, Fitbit will spit total daily energy expenditure (tdee) figures that are within 5% of reality for most people.
Note that this still leaves a 100 Cal margin of error in a 2000 Cal day. But so do food logging errors.
Unless errors are systematic they tend to cancel as opposed to reinforce each other.
So, if the deficit you've chosen is appropriate, the easiest thing to do is eat according to Fitbit and MFP while logging as accurately as you can. Connect Fitbit.com to trendweight.com (both free) and get a handle on your weight trend over time. After 4-6 weeks compare your progress to your expected progress. And adjust if needed.3 -
phyllis731 wrote: »I don't eat back my calories. Extra calories available = a win in my book. I'm pretty sure calories left is how we lose weight.
Like I said in my post, that's fine if we're talking 100-200 calories. My average daily calorie burn (*without* workouts) is ~1,000 calories more than my sedentary burn would be. It's ~700 calories/day more than what MFP tells me if I follow its instructions and pick "lightly active" because I teach for a living.
Not eating those back (or, at least, not eating back most of them) would *not* be a win.2 -
Those who use fotnits, do you eat back your cals earned?
Not always. I found that there would be some obvious screw-ups, like if you mow the lawn with the thing on, the vibration adds a bunch of steps, which is annoying (I got numbers like 15000, which is ridiculous.). I'd like to know the actual steps during lawn mowing. When I went cycling or swimming, it added nothing. (It annoyed me that it wasn't waterproof like the newer ones.) If most of your exercise is walking and running, then you can trust the numbers. If you do stuff that it misses or that it overestimates, then you can't. In the end, I un-linked it and added the calories manually when they seemed reasonable.
PS I'm pretty impressed with Google Fit, which is an Android app.1 -
Jthanmyfitnesspal wrote: »PS I'm pretty impressed with Google Fit, which is an Android app.
I am most definitely vehemently unimpressed with google fit.
Google Fit persistently (and criminally) under-estimates my burn.
I just did January for the heck of it. January was *take your pick* a 0.9lbs trending weight loss or 1.4lbs scale weight loss for me.
My food as logged on MFP for 31 days was 83729 Cal or 2700 Cal a day.
Taking into account the loss, my caloric expenditure was between 2800 and 2850 Cal a day.
Google Fit gave me a maintenance level of 2355 Cal a day.
This would be about 500 Cal less a day than actual maintenance.
Fitbit by comparison is over-estimating me by maybe 150 Cal a day.2 -
Jthanmyfitnesspal wrote: »like if you mow the lawn with the thing on, the vibration adds a bunch of steps, which is annoying (I got numbers like 15000, which is ridiculous.). I'd like to know the actual steps during lawn mowing.
Have you tried putting it in your back pocket instead of wearing it on your wrist? It should still catch the steps, but the vibrations will be dampened.
Google Fit never worked for me, but that's in large part because I only carry my phone with me if I'm traveling a significant distance, so it misses all my incidental steps (which means it misses a significant fraction of my daily activity - all walking I do while teaching, all walking to and from class, all playing with the kids at home, all doing chores at home, etc.).1 -
I do a lot of hand motions at work as a music teacher. I pull it off my wrist and stick it in a pocket or hook it around a belt loop. It seems to work well there too. It probably would help with vibration issues.Jthanmyfitnesspal wrote: »Those who use fotnits, do you eat back your cals earned?
Not always. I found that there would be some obvious screw-ups, like if you mow the lawn with the thing on, the vibration adds a bunch of steps, which is annoying (I got numbers like 15000, which is ridiculous.). I'd like to know the actual steps during lawn mowing. When I went cycling or swimming, it added nothing. (It annoyed me that it wasn't waterproof like the newer ones.) If most of your exercise is walking and running, then you can trust the numbers. If you do stuff that it misses or that it overestimates, then you can't. In the end, I un-linked it and added the calories manually when they seemed reasonable.
PS I'm pretty impressed with Google Fit, which is an Android app.
And I log cycling and swimming as exercise. It won't give you distance- for cycling you need to enter the distance for an accurate count, but it will calculate calories.
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Jthanmyfitnesspal wrote: »Those who use fotnits, do you eat back your cals earned?
Not always. I found that there would be some obvious screw-ups, like if you mow the lawn with the thing on, the vibration adds a bunch of steps, which is annoying (I got numbers like 15000, which is ridiculous.). I'd like to know the actual steps during lawn mowing. When I went cycling or swimming, it added nothing. (It annoyed me that it wasn't waterproof like the newer ones.) If most of your exercise is walking and running, then you can trust the numbers. If you do stuff that it misses or that it overestimates, then you can't. In the end, I un-linked it and added the calories manually when they seemed reasonable.
PS I'm pretty impressed with Google Fit, which is an Android app.
Good tip, mow the lawn before boy's night out!0 -
I do most of the time. Seems to work fine. 1
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I eat back around half.... losing a little faster than my selected loss, but I like to keep that buffer to cover any logging errors and perhaps a little bonus loss as incentive to keep active1
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