Fitbit and MFP Calories "Left" don't match. Confused.

orapronobis
orapronobis Posts: 460 Member
edited November 21 in Health and Weight Loss
I recently purchased a fitbit and I'm loving the calories burned feature. Looking at my "food" page on MFP, I have a 317 "exercise" credit, giving me a calorie goal of 1,517 today and 799 calories remaining to eat. I just synced my fitbit and it says I have burned only 1,124 calories so far only 103 calories remaining to eat today. The calories "in" match; but the calories "out" and "remaining" never match. Can someone help me understand this?

Replies

  • kgirlhart
    kgirlhart Posts: 5,188 Member
    They will match at midnight. Mfp is estimating a little differenly than Fitbit. Mfp uses your activity level to figure out your burn for the day. Fitbit assumes that you will continue to burn at the same rate all day that you have burned so far. It is best just to look at the mfp calorie goal for food. Later in the day if you are burning more calories fitbit will likely give you more.
  • orapronobis
    orapronobis Posts: 460 Member
    LOL!!!!!!!!!!
  • CyberTone
    CyberTone Posts: 7,337 Member
    kshama2001 wrote: »
    MFP assumes you will live until midnight; FitBit is unwilling to go out on a limb like that.

    You win the internet today!
  • collectingblues
    collectingblues Posts: 2,541 Member
    kshama2001 wrote: »
    MFP assumes you will live until midnight; FitBit is unwilling to go out on a limb like that.

    That is awesome.
  • WinoGelato
    WinoGelato Posts: 13,454 Member
    The calories remaining never matched for me - the two systems work off of different algorithms. Rather than trying to get the two to match up, or understand where the numbers come from, you're better off just picking one system (MFP usually) to drive the logging of your calorie intake in, and then one system (FitBit) to estimate the steps and associated calorie burn (calories out), then the two together will work out an adjustment (reflected in MFP) that you can feel reasonably confident in after a period of time and monitoring your actual results.

    As others pointed out, the calorie adjustment changes over the course of the day as it is "prorated" based on time of day you have more activity than others, and then as the day goes on, it sort of levels off. If you go to bed early, you may see a big change in the remaining calories from the end of the day when you wake up the next morning.

    The other important thing to understand is that this is really a "true up" of what MFP thinks you'd burn, based on what you entered for your stats and activity level, and what FitBit actually says you burn. So if you said you were sedentary, and you actually average 15K steps/day, you'll see really big exercise adjustments, because you aren't sedentary. You can also build in the safety net of the negative calorie adjustment into your numbers, so that even if you choose an activity level other than sedentary, but have a low activity day, MFP will give you negative cals to account for the fact that you haven't met your minimum calorie burn that it's expecting.

    Hope that helps - I have used FitBit and MFP for about 4 years and have found them to work very well together, I lost the weight I set out to lose and am now maintaining while trusting them.
  • Francl27
    Francl27 Posts: 26,371 Member
    kgirlhart wrote: »
    They will match at midnight. Mfp is estimating a little differenly than Fitbit. Mfp uses your activity level to figure out your burn for the day. Fitbit assumes that you will continue to burn at the same rate all day that you have burned so far. It is best just to look at the mfp calorie goal for food. Later in the day if you are burning more calories fitbit will likely give you more.
    kshama2001 wrote: »
    MFP assumes you will live until midnight; FitBit is unwilling to go out on a limb like that.

    Actually, you guys got it wrong.

    MFP assumes that your activity level will be the same until midnight, yes... but Fitbit gives you your BMR calories for the rest of the day. It absolutely doesn't assume that you will stay active, nor does it assume that you're not going to burn calories at all... it just assumes that you will be sedentary the rest of the day.

    So unless you're still up on your feet doing things until midnight, you should NOT trust MFP numbers. Fitbit's 'remaining calories' number is the one you want to look at, knowing that you'll probably earn a few extra calories from moving the rest of the day.

    I always lose about 150 calories with MFP overnight. I'm set on active and do 15-25k steps a day.

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