Fitbit and Calories-Can this be right???

jringold1

I've really started logging everything into MFP. Currently I am trying to drop 60 pounds and MFP gives me a budget of 1663 calories per day (to average 2 pounds a week). My Fitbit Blaze syncs with MFP. Today so far I have had 12,500 steps (as of 3PM). I just checked my MFP Home page and this is my daily summary:
goal: 1,663 Calories
food: 629
exercise: 858
Net: - 229
So first, I am wondering if I really burned that many calories with 12,500 steps. (Note: I am not entering any exercise calories in MFP, they are all coming from Fitbit).
Second, it looks like I need to eat somewhere around 1800 calories more today? Of course there is no way I could eat that much - but for the sake of argument, does this even sound right?

_runnerbean_

Have you set up your Fitbit app and mfp with your correct height and weight?
I've done 8k steps today and it's added around 250 cals (female, weight 158 lbs). If you are a heavy male your calories could be correct.

jringold1

I am a HEAVY male - 5'11, 254... Although I was at 275 beginning of the year. Just sayin. - Kriss, what is TDEE and NEAT?

jringold1

_runnerbean_ wrote: »

Have you set up your Fitbit app and mfp with your correct height and weight?

My settings should be dialed in perfectly - I use Fitbit Aria to measure my weight and body mass - it automatically sends that to Fitbit. Then Fitbit syncs my weight to MFP along with my exercise. The only thing I actually enter is my food.

PAV8888

Yes.

Your 2lbs a week are baked into your 1663 goal. The rest of the adjustments are there to make sure you don't create a larger deficit than what you have selected.

Not only is rapid weight loss a risk factor for gallstones but it can also lead to excess lean mass lost. When you enter the overweight range consider reducing you rate of loss to 1.5lbs or even 1lb.

In the meanwhile connect Fitbit.com to trendweight.com.

Use your trending weight changes to evaluate what your scale tells you and the two together with your logging to evaluate whether Fitbit and your logging are working together with enough accuracy to serve your purpose.

As a male you can make adjustments in a shorter 2-3 week timeframe if you need to as you don't have hormonal water retention cycles.

@Look_Its_Kriss regardless of what we call it, as soon as you enable integration between Fitbit and MFP (together with negative adjustments) you ARE using the "TDEE" method.

Another way to view this is that at approximately 15500 steps a day you "top out" of MFPs "highly active" setting.

The news to you (and it took me a long time to realise this when it came to myself) is that even though you're "only walking", when you are walking 10000 steps a day you ARE what these days is classified as an active person. And when you walk more than ~15500 steps you EXCEED what these days is classified as a highly active person.

(**The Aria's body fat calculations appear to be even more inaccurate than the normally very inaccurate bio-impedence scale measurements. Take them with a huge grain of salt. My personal take after comparing my personal Aria body composition results to my corresponding DEXA scans is that I can NOT derive meaningful information from the Aria)

jringold1

Thanks @pav8888 . Well I guess I just exceeded the 'Highly Active' category - which is totally opposite of how I was a month ago. I have been slowly working up to 10K steps a day - yesterday I hit it and today I am at a little over 16K. While I am majorly tired and my hips are pretty sore - I mentally feel great. I'm hopeful I can keep this up. During the week I am parked behind a desk so it's harder to get steps. Friday, an employee group brought in BBQ and wings. To deal with this, I ate my Nutrisystem cheeseburger and then went out and walked the parking lot for 30 minutes. @Look_Its_Kriss , looking at what you have done is really an inspiration. The fact that you have negative adjustments turned off and I know you are pretty active - I am wondering now what your true calorie deficit is. Anyway, I was just shocked at my deficit and wanted confirmation that it was somewhat accurate.

PAV8888

Look_Its_Kriss wrote: »

@PAV8888 -- i don't have negative calorie adjustments turned on.
Honestly.. there is just too much.. do this and don't do that and set your MFP to this and log this here and don't log this here for me.. i pretty much loathe the intergration lol.. i am probably gonna disconnect the two of them.

I think you're making it too complicated by not trusting it.

It is not like you NEED to lose at this point.

And it is not like you're likely to gain crazily by being a bit off.

So set it to full integration negative calories enabled base activity to active or highly active.

Expect to get the negative adjustment when you wake up and to catch up on your way to about ~2300 by the end of the day.

Expect to eat a little bit less and to be negative calories all the way on the days you don't move... targeting eating a bit less.

Leave it connected with trendweight and re-evaluate things after a month or so.

The thing is that Fitbit is giving you an external evaluation of whether you're moving or not. MFP of what you're eating. If you get the two dialled in... coasting on auto-pilot.

All these things are innacurate enough that a feedback correction loop is still necessary.but accurate enough to be helpful and useful.

(But other feedback loops also exist and are valid, obviously!!!)

PAV8888

jringold1 wrote: »

@Look_Its_Kriss , looking at what you have done is really an inspiration. The fact that you have negative adjustments turned off and I know you are pretty active - I am wondering now what your true calorie deficit is. Anyway, I was just shocked at my deficit and wanted confirmation that it was somewhat accurate.

Your deficit sounds about right FOR THE ACTIVITY.

Negative adjustments only come into play if your total TDEE (for the day) is LESS than MFP expects it to be. Then Fitbit takes away calories. So this comes into play on inactive days.

For example I am setup as highly active because 80+% of the time I exceed the MFP highly active level.

But there do exist days where I do not get anywhere near 15k steps.

If I ignored them and didn't reduce my calories on those days I would eat more than I spend! Negative adjustments lets me know how much I can eat on those days while remaining on target.

Of course negative adjustments would be much smaller if you're setup as sedentary (they would still be there and would affect you if you had less than ~3500 steps in a day).

Ultimately the smallest overall mix of positive and negative adjustments occurs when MFP is set as close as possible to your actual activity level as measured by Fitbit.

Christine_72

Look_Its_Kriss wrote: »

as a 5 foot 3, 135 pound female, i get about a 1200 calorie burn from putting in 18000-19000 steps per day.

personally i find using the TDEE method a lot easier then the NEAT method when using MFP when you have a fitbit

Jeepers! I got 20,305 steps yesterday, and i got 784 calories shuttled over to MFP. I'm 5'8, 149lbs, but I'm older than you, 45.


ETA:

And, i also just remembered that i told fitbit I'm 50, because i was getting crazy inflated burns that did not mesh at all with my weight loss! I have the Alta, no HR monitor.

rileysowner

jringold1 wrote: »

I've really started logging everything into MFP. Currently I am trying to drop 60 pounds and MFP gives me a budget of 1663 calories per day (to average 2 pounds a week). My Fitbit Blaze syncs with MFP. Today so far I have had 12,500 steps (as of 3PM). I just checked my MFP Home page and this is my daily summary:
goal: 1,663 Calories
food: 629
exercise: 858
Net: - 229
So first, I am wondering if I really burned that many calories with 12,500 steps. (Note: I am not entering any exercise calories in MFP, they are all coming from Fitbit).
Second, it looks like I need to eat somewhere around 1800 calories more today? Of course there is no way I could eat that much - but for the sake of argument, does this even sound right?

It does not sound unrealistic at all, especially if you set up your account as sedentary.

try2again

jringold1 wrote: »

Thanks @pav8888 . Well I guess I just exceeded the 'Highly Active' category - which is totally opposite of how I was a month ago. I have been slowly working up to 10K steps a day - yesterday I hit it and today I am at a little over 16K. While I am majorly tired and my hips are pretty sore - I mentally feel great. I'm hopeful I can keep this up. During the week I am parked behind a desk so it's harder to get steps. Friday, an employee group brought in BBQ and wings. To deal with this, I ate my Nutrisystem cheeseburger and then went out and walked the parking lot for 30 minutes. @Look_Its_Kriss , looking at what you have done is really an inspiration. The fact that you have negative adjustments turned off and I know you are pretty active - I am wondering now what your true calorie deficit is. Anyway, I was just shocked at my deficit and wanted confirmation that it was somewhat accurate.

Just a word of caution, OP. When I was heavier and started walking too much all at once, I ended up with bursitis in my hip that sidelined me for quite a while. Slow & steady really does win the race

HappyAnna2014

Look_Its_Kriss wrote: »

@PAV8888 -- i don't have negative calorie adjustments turned on.
Honestly.. there is just too much.. do this and don't do that and set your MFP to this and log this here and don't log this here for me.. i pretty much loathe the intergration lol.. i am probably gonna disconnect the two of them.

That's what I did. Un-integrated the two. It made fitness A LOT easier.

PAV8888

Look_Its_Kriss wrote: »

I will give @PAV8888 suggestion a try and see what happens.. at the moment the math seems a bit out of place so im going to have to wait and see if im the same in 30 days or if i have a drop in weight suddenly.. i had a 5 week stall before at 213 pounds for that long.

Two things.

CHANGING settings during a particular day.

I would look at that day with an asterisk as there are delays in integration information exchange, and potentially bugs when the goals and settings change halfway through the day.

The same applies to time changes that are do not take place simultaneously on both Fitbit and MFP. Or sometimes when changing to a new Fitbit device during the day.

Second (and I am sure that there will be some disagreement from the gallery), our bodies do adjust our CO, to a degree, with both reduced and increased availability of calories.

This adaptive thermogenesis tends to cover a wider range of adjustment going down than going up; but there exist examples in both directions.

A common example going down is a reduction in core temperature (often described as feeling cold) when losing weight. Reduction in core temperature = less calories burned = reduced calories out = a small adaptation that reduces CO and slows down weight loss. Similarly other changes to NEAT such as reduced twitching also take place. Reduced activity after a workout compared to activity that would have otherwise occured is another one.

An extreme example going up is hypermetabolism during recovery from anorexia where people have to sometimes eat in excess of 3k calories for months at a time in order to gain any weight at all even if they are not exercising and are relatively light.

But usually when going up the breadth of adjustment is smaller, and as people who have recently lost weight we are mostly primed for regain, and in particular primed to regain fat.

Where is all this going?

That just because you are not gaining at 2100 does not mean 2100 is your maximum. Maybe it is, or maybe 22, or 2300 is your actual maximum.

Unfortunately the only way to find your true maximum is to probe **with carefully measured CICO** until weight regain occurs.

I will anegdotically tell you that in the past few weeks i've increased my goal by about 150 Cal, and it has yet to make a difference to my weight that I can quantify.

But my hair and nails are now growing more rapidly and I HAVE been sauntering around with a bit more energy during my walks.

But, I admit that my level of logging probably verges on obsessive, so making such small changes may be quite challenging for people who log more loosely.

PAV8888

try2again wrote: »

jringold1 wrote: »

Thanks @pav8888 . Well I guess I just exceeded the 'Highly Active' category - which is totally opposite of how I was a month ago. I have been slowly working up to 10K steps a day - yesterday I hit it and today I am at a little over 16K. While I am majorly tired and my hips are pretty sore - I mentally feel great. I'm hopeful I can keep this up. During the week I am parked behind a desk so it's harder to get steps. Friday, an employee group brought in BBQ and wings. To deal with this, I ate my Nutrisystem cheeseburger and then went out and walked the parking lot for 30 minutes. @Look_Its_Kriss , looking at what you have done is really an inspiration. The fact that you have negative adjustments turned off and I know you are pretty active - I am wondering now what your true calorie deficit is. Anyway, I was just shocked at my deficit and wanted confirmation that it was somewhat accurate.

Just a word of caution, OP. When I was heavier and started walking too much all at once, I ended up with bursitis in my hip that sidelined me for quite a while. Slow & steady really does win the race

Used to get blister upon blister. And complaining knees. So yeah, ramp up with care.