Which is better at predicting calories - Fitbit or MFP?

heybales

Many people see the advice (and so I could see the Fitbit advice being such) of setting the walking stride length to their exercise pace - which is only used for say 1 hr daily, or less often.

The Fitbit does dynamically adjust used stride length based on the figure stride length given and your weight, and it calculates from each step impact what that one stride length must have been, length and time is pace, pace and weight is calorie burn.

But as you might guess, if the stride length figure is set to the extreme side of the range of fast pace, it's ability to adjust way down to grocery store shuffle is going to be off.

So it's best to head to a known distance track for a good 1/4 mile, and walk it at normal average daily pace, which is usually going to feel very slow in that setting. Start the workout at the mark, end it at the mark after 1 lap. (confirm the distance marks since many are meter tracks now).
Now you have what Fitbit thought the distance as, and most important the steps actually done.

1320 / steps = stride length decimal feet.inches.

Feet in that setting.
0.inches x 12 = decimal inches in that setting.

Running same thing - pick the middle pace you are likely to go between the extremes.

Of course the more steps you do daily the more important those figures are.
The average user attempting as goals to get to 10K steps and walking as only exercise might do fine on default values, but it can't hurt to attempt more accuracy.