Fitbit question

rdmitch

cmtigger wrote: »

Jthanmyfitnesspal wrote: »

mjj79 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.

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.

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.

Here is a perfect example. I checked and had about 4,000 steps prior to 8:00 pm. After a 4 hour show I registered 24,000 steps.
Granted, feet and arms moving at a steady pace and heart rate definitely elevated. For sure it was a good cardio experience... but not
equal to 20,000 paces. Calories on the Fitbit registered over 4,000 which was an increase of around 2500 from reading prior to show.

karahm78

If you have problems with hand motions, try the Fitbit One. I wear it clipped on my bra, DH on his pants pocket and we get very accurate counts.

Jthanmyfitnesspal

rdmitch wrote: »

Here is a perfect example. I checked and had about 4,000 steps prior to 8:00 pm. After a 4 hour show I registered 24,000 steps.
Granted, feet and arms moving at a steady pace and heart rate definitely elevated. For sure it was a good cardio experience... but not
equal to 20,000 paces. Calories on the Fitbit registered over 4,000 which was an increase of around 2500 from reading prior to show.

Thank you for being a music teachers! Some of my favorite people are music teachers.

That's the downside of Fitbit: occasional overestimate of steps. The downside of phone apps: frequent underestimate of steps. (You'd have to have it in a hip pocket all the time to get a good reading. Not at all good if it's in your purse!). A big advantage of Fitbit is they can monitor HR, but not when on your belt loop. So there is some finesse needed to interpret the calorie estimate from either one. This is what led me to un-link the apps.

ParadiseLost91

Yes, I eat all of them back, including calories "just" from steps. I eat 1200 calories as a "baseline", but as a veterinary student I am on my feet all day, and since I work with large animals (horses and cows), I can have quite active days when patients are non-compliant, to put it nicely haha :-)
I need my food and energy to be able to to a good job, so I eat all my FitBit calories. And then when I chill on the weekends I just get the 1200 a day. It works well, I'm losing weight steadily with this method.

Sassafras106

Jthanmyfitnesspal wrote: »

mjj79 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.

Put it in your pocket. That's what I do when shopping or pushing a stroller