Eating Back Calories Given from FitBit

heybales

fuzacoza wrote: »

WinoGelato wrote: »

fuzacoza wrote: »

RGv2 wrote: »

fuzacoza wrote: »

To me eating exercise calories is like walking to McDonald's to buy a BigMac meal.

Then you don't understand how the tool "MFP" works.

I think it's kind of distorted to compare properly fueling your body to that of walking to McDonalds for a BigMac. If I didn't eat back my calories, I'd come up with a net of 0-300 cals everyday. I don't see that as the most healthy.

WinoGelato wrote: »

No - this is basically all wrong. The number that MFP provides you is an estimate of your NEAT - which is your BMR (the cals you burn just being alive) plus an estimate of your calories from daily activity based on what activity level you chose. When you exercise and burn more calories than that you are meant to be eating those calories back to fuel your Total activity. FitBit provides a calorie adjustment which is representative of the difference between what MFP thought you’d burn and the total amount FitBit says you burn.

Ignoring those completely means you are significantly under fueling your body, and thinking it’s good to try to be just at your BMR when you are clearly an active person? That’s just a recipe for failure.

Eating 1800 ish calories and exercising off 1100 is the same as if you only ate 700 cals and did no exercise. Does that sound healthy?

Yeah I can take good advice! I like food.

Well gosh I sure am glad you finally got some good advice.

It is always welcome. I eat healthy and balanced I guess, so never felt the need to eat into my exercise cals. If I feel like it eat a banana or chai/whey shake pre and post runs. Never had health issues, I go for check ups, check my vitals etc. Posting here I realized I am in better shape I actually thought I was

So you don't want to become vitamin or mineral deficient it sounds like (healthy & balanced eating).

While to lose weight you obviously need to be calorie deficient to a degree - too big is not good either.

Just as your body doesn't exactly show signs of V & M issue until it's bad enough to show up some way, and even then usually need a blood test or great comparison of effect & possible causes to increase eating what's missing - your body won't show fast responses to having a caloric deficiency that's too big.

Hunger isn't always trustworthy, as body can adapt in other ways to relieve a huge deficit it doesn't like.

Good to hear willing to take some of the advice - keeping that fitness ability in there.
Who knows - likely could be even better, just may not know!

Oh - many fats are healthy, should easily be possible to eat more without the light calorie stuff taking up a lot of room.

PAV8888

You're certainly a FAST bunny!

Glad you're getting the memo that people who go around running for an hour and a half AND cover 15K are DEFINITELY in the "athlete" category!

Looking at TDEE charts is worthwhile when you don't yet have any other information and it is useful for periodical cross-checking purposes.

But, and especially if most of your activity is "step based", Fitbit does a pretty adequate job of figuring things out for you, so I don't know that you have to rely on chart ranges at this point.

Fitbit averages the activity it senses over every 5 time minute period and gives you calories at a single MET value for the time period. It then varies this MET value per 5 minute time periods throughout the day.

Most formulas assign a single MET value to the complete time period of the exercise/activity.

We've had disagreements before about the "final word" provided by the runner world formulas.

I consider the formulas to be good and useful cross checks for values determined in other ways.

When you are trying to determine a caloric burn there are some parameters that might be relevant: gender, height, weight, incline, speed, distance, heart rate, breaks in the activity, whether the person is carrying items, type of terrain, wind, etc, all come to mind.

So when your formulas don't account for a lot of relevant parameters they are just another "averaging" formula that does not derive inherently greater validity because it was published by a well known running magazine as opposed to being the formula used by a ubiquitous fitness tracker.

Also, IIRC, some runner world formulas are for net calories, some are for gross calories.

Reporting a run's calories is usually done in gross calories when one looks at an activity in an app or watch. While MFP itself does not account for the difference between net and gross calories when it comes to logging an exercise activity (which is a major source of the "exercise calories are over-stated issue"), the Fitbit-MFP integration takes care of the conversion of gross to net calories!

So when you're looking at your daily Fitbit adjustment to MFP you're looking at a number derived from Fitbit's estimation of your TDEE-- as long as you haven't made deliberate or accidental changes to the values it has detected on its own.

And in any case, all this is basically irrelevant.

Contrary to your assertion of being obese you're at ~27.5 bmi. And between your running and following rugby forums I somehow get the distinct impression that you are not the most excessively fat bmi 27.5 person. In other words you sound like a prime example of a not so overweight athletic male with an overweight BMI.

Between your actual body fat % and (if I read correctly, over 50 age), you may be closer to the bottom of overweight/top end of the normal weight range than anywhere else. And before accepting BIA scale estimates for your fat % I would almost consider BMI to be more accurate! ;-)

So even though you may think of yourself as being so far off... you may be actually quite a bit closer to "normal" fat levels.

In any case, it does not sound like you should be aiming for anything beyond 500 Cal a day deficits, which in the context of a 3500 Cal TDEE is like a 15%, not 50% cut off of your TDEE!

And since you have a Fitbit, you might as well connect it to trendweight.com so that you can start looking at your weight trend over time as opposed to your daily scale weight!

Take care!

fuzacoza

heybales wrote: »

fuzacoza wrote: »

WinoGelato wrote: »

fuzacoza wrote: »

RGv2 wrote: »

fuzacoza wrote: »

To me eating exercise calories is like walking to McDonald's to buy a BigMac meal.

Then you don't understand how the tool "MFP" works.

I think it's kind of distorted to compare properly fueling your body to that of walking to McDonalds for a BigMac. If I didn't eat back my calories, I'd come up with a net of 0-300 cals everyday. I don't see that as the most healthy.

WinoGelato wrote: »

No - this is basically all wrong. The number that MFP provides you is an estimate of your NEAT - which is your BMR (the cals you burn just being alive) plus an estimate of your calories from daily activity based on what activity level you chose. When you exercise and burn more calories than that you are meant to be eating those calories back to fuel your Total activity. FitBit provides a calorie adjustment which is representative of the difference between what MFP thought you’d burn and the total amount FitBit says you burn.

Ignoring those completely means you are significantly under fueling your body, and thinking it’s good to try to be just at your BMR when you are clearly an active person? That’s just a recipe for failure.

Eating 1800 ish calories and exercising off 1100 is the same as if you only ate 700 cals and did no exercise. Does that sound healthy?

Yeah I can take good advice! I like food.

Well gosh I sure am glad you finally got some good advice.

It is always welcome. I eat healthy and balanced I guess, so never felt the need to eat into my exercise cals. If I feel like it eat a banana or chai/whey shake pre and post runs. Never had health issues, I go for check ups, check my vitals etc. Posting here I realized I am in better shape I actually thought I was

So you don't want to become vitamin or mineral deficient it sounds like (healthy & balanced eating).

While to lose weight you obviously need to be calorie deficient to a degree - too big is not good either.

Just as your body doesn't exactly show signs of V & M issue until it's bad enough to show up some way, and even then usually need a blood test or great comparison of effect & possible causes to increase eating what's missing - your body won't show fast responses to having a caloric deficiency that's too big.

Hunger isn't always trustworthy, as body can adapt in other ways to relieve a huge deficit it doesn't like.

Good to hear willing to take some of the advice - keeping that fitness ability in there.
Who knows - likely could be even better, just may not know!

Oh - many fats are healthy, should easily be possible to eat more without the light calorie stuff taking up a lot of room.

Indeed my diet normally leans to HFLC but I have carb cycles preparing for a longer run or maybe a race day here and there. Carbs hold back a lot of water and I am particulary sensitive to it. Thanks for for your input.

fuzacoza

PAV8888 wrote: »

You're certainly a FAST bunny!

Glad you're getting the memo that people who go around running for an hour and a half AND cover 15K are DEFINITELY in the "athlete" category!

Looking at TDEE charts is worthwhile when you don't yet have any other information and it is useful for periodical cross-checking purposes.

But, and especially if most of your activity is "step based", Fitbit does a pretty adequate job of figuring things out for you, so I don't know that you have to rely on chart ranges at this point.

Fitbit averages the activity it senses over every 5 time minute period and gives you calories at a single MET value for the time period. It then varies this MET value per 5 minute time periods throughout the day.

Most formulas assign a single MET value to the complete time period of the exercise/activity.

We've had disagreements before about the "final word" provided by the runner world formulas.

I consider the formulas to be good and useful cross checks for values determined in other ways.

When you are trying to determine a caloric burn there are some parameters that might be relevant: gender, height, weight, incline, speed, distance, heart rate, breaks in the activity, whether the person is carrying items, type of terrain, wind, etc, all come to mind.

So when your formulas don't account for a lot of relevant parameters they are just another "averaging" formula that does not derive inherently greater validity because it was published by a well known running magazine as opposed to being the formula used by a ubiquitous fitness tracker.

Also, IIRC, some runner world formulas are for net calories, some are for gross calories.

Reporting a run's calories is usually done in gross calories when one looks at an activity in an app or watch. While MFP itself does not account for the difference between net and gross calories when it comes to logging an exercise activity (which is a major source of the "exercise calories are over-stated issue"), the Fitbit-MFP integration takes care of the conversion of gross to net calories!

So when you're looking at your daily Fitbit adjustment to MFP you're looking at a number derived from Fitbit's estimation of your TDEE-- as long as you haven't made deliberate or accidental changes to the values it has detected on its own.

And in any case, all this is basically irrelevant.

Contrary to your assertion of being obese you're at ~27.5 bmi. And between your running and following rugby forums I somehow get the distinct impression that you are not the most excessively fat bmi 27.5 person. In other words you sound like a prime example of a not so overweight athletic male with an overweight BMI.

Between your actual body fat % and (if I read correctly, over 50 age), you may be closer to the bottom of overweight/top end of the normal weight range than anywhere else. And before accepting BIA scale estimates for your fat % I would almost consider BMI to be more accurate! ;-)

So even though you may think of yourself as being so far off... you may be actually quite a bit closer to "normal" fat levels.

In any case, it does not sound like you should be aiming for anything beyond 500 Cal a day deficits, which in the context of a 3500 Cal TDEE is like a 15%, not 50% cut off of your TDEE!

And since you have a Fitbit, you might as well connect it to trendweight.com so that you can start looking at your weight trend over time as opposed to your daily scale weight!

Take care!

Great read, thank you. I normally don't restrict my food intake where I throw in intermittent fasting where I have 1800 calories at one sitting, which can be a lot of healthier food if you cut out gluten, simple carbs and high calorie stuff like nuts.

Actually doing a half-marathon this Saturday and see if I can get it sub 1h40, so will post results : )