Fitbit and MPF Overcounting Exercise?

jamiecole6857
jamiecole6857 Posts: 5 Member
edited November 27 in Getting Started
Hi,

I'm new to both MFP and FitBit, I've signed up and purchased respectively on the advice of one of the trainers at the gym I use.

While I work out a lot I had just been doing the elliptical trainer and while my cardio has improved I was not seeing the weight loss I wanted so I've now:

1) Started doing different things in the gym - including more strength
2) Started religiously logging my calories in MFP.

I've synced my FitBit with MFP but the calorie adjustments to me seem way to high - maybe giving some figures will help.

MFP and FitBit calculate my BMR as almost the same

FitBit BMR: 1,976
MFP BMR: 1,958

I've got my MFP Fitness Profile set to Sedentary as I have a desk job even though I work out intensively 4 or 5 times a week for an hour - my idea was to add the calories through the FitBit which should be more accurate than manually adding exercise into MFP.

FitBit has set a daily calorie goal on the dashboard of 3,162 which seems really high to me and I'm not sure where it has done this, but I was planning on using the MFP weight loss goal of 1890 calories plus whatever exercise I do.

This is where the problems come in - yesterday I did quite a lot of exercise. As actual work outs go (these numbers are from the FitBit):

Spin Class: 354 cals
Workout: 321 cals
Walk: 213 cals
Total: 888 cals

I do not log exercise in MFP, I was planning on usign the FitBit to to this for me. I don't care about a log a specific exercises in MPF, just the calorie counts

Aside from these logged exercises I work in an office, and while I use the stairs instead of the lift I can't image I burned too many more calories over my BMR. However

The FitBit reckons my daily burn should be 3,162 (no idea where to set this on FitBit) and yesterday I burned 3,945 which is 125% of my FitBit goal.

This seems way to high to me, and when it synced with MFP it really causes problems, this is the sync info:

Fitbit Calories Burned Full Day Projection - 3941
MyFitnessPal Calories Burned - 2444
Fitbit Calorie Adjustment - 1,497

This seems excessive to me, as an example yesterday I supposedly was allowed to eat 3,387 calories and still lose 0.5kg a week on average.

Am I misunderstanding something somewhere? I didn't eat that may calories yesterday...


Replies

  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 9,979 Member
    Yes, Fitbit can be way off for many people, especially those with HR sensor. Just think of it: fitbit assumes you're working out when your heartrate goes up. But what is a high heartrate for some might be a low heartrate for others. And if your heartrate is not standard but a bit higher when you move then you get crazy calorie numbers, which are only there on paper.

    I experimented with mine a bit as I have a high maxHR. I get crazy burns just walking through a supermarket, and also fairly high burns when I watch an exciting movie! The same would be true for people who are very unfit and whose heartrate shoots up from doing very little. Note: there is no connection between heartrate and calorieburn.
  • jamiecole6857
    jamiecole6857 Posts: 5 Member
    That makes sense - my exercise does take my heart rate up to around 180 (I've been doing this for years, it's not a new thing), and even light exercise can take me well above 130.

    How annoying - kinda makes the whole project a little pointless
  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 9,979 Member
    Well.. the sports industry, like so many others live of selling useless *kitten*. Just think of city bikes with suspension: makes the bike heavy, eats up a lot of energy, high in maintenance, actually useful suspension costs a lot of money, and why do you need them if you're not offroading downhill? Yet so many bikes have them. /rant
  • WinoGelato
    WinoGelato Posts: 13,454 Member
    I would wait 2-3 weeks before reading too much into the numbers since both systems are new for you - FitBit in particular gets more accurate as it figures out your routine.

    Even then, trying to analyze both sets of numbers to get them to align perfectly is likely an exercise in futility. MFP and FitBit work off of different algorithms, they sync and adjust frequently throughout the day, etc.

    You didn’t share your stats and goal, are you trying to lose weight, how much and what rate of loss did you choose? Providing that info will help people determine if the numbers you’re seeing seem reasonable.

    Personally I wouldn’t immediately discount them. Many people find that they are more active than they thought when they got a FitBit - for example I’m a petite female with a desk job that averages 12-15k steps a day so my TDEE according to FitBit is ~2200 - much higher than what many would assume.

    When you set up MFP what calorie target did it provide for your goal? I would start with eating back about 50% of the adjustments from FitBit and then monitoring for several weeks to see if the adjustments change and if you are losing at the desired rate of loss.

    Personally mine has been very accurate for me and I know several others that have had good results trusting FitBit and MFP to work together.
  • jamiecole6857
    jamiecole6857 Posts: 5 Member
    Thanks for your reply WinoGelato

    My goal is weight loss, i'm currently 99kg and I thought a good initial goal is losing 9kg to bring me to 90kg, I'm 185cm and MFP reckons my BMR is 1,958. Using an online TDEE calculator I get 2,372 cals/day. I'm planning on losing 0.5kg a week which is the normal level recommended for metric users.

    I used the "sedentary" option as my job is an office job so I don't get too much in the way of calorie burn except from exercise I explicitly do - for me this is the gym.

    For years I've just been going to the gym and burning 800 cals on the elliptical trainer (according to the trainer's display) day in day out (averaging 4 days a week) but this hasn't been working as I'm the same weight as 3 years ago. As such I've taken a new look at it and switched up my exercise (still a lot of cardio, but adding in strength and doing exercises I'm not used to). This is why I bought the FitBit.

    For FitBit is TDEE what it reckons your daily calorie intake will be? Currently after a gym session I'm showing 76% of 3,162 cals - I assume this number is waht FitBit assumes my TDEE is a day?

    MFP show 2,444 for the "MyFitnessPal Calories Burned" on the FitBit adjustment info - so I assume this is what it thinks my TDEE is. Perhaps this is high as it identifies I do about 800 calls of actual gym work, and then there's walking up the stairs etc.

    I will stick with it - just maybe not trust that I can eat 1,500 more calories just because MFP thinks so

  • jamiecole6857
    jamiecole6857 Posts: 5 Member
    Thanks for very much for that - no at that time I wasn't calorie tracking but I was trying to eat very healthily. 5 days a week I was eating

    1) 40g porridge with semi skimmed milk and some raisins for breakfast
    2) a small home made vegetable soup and a dry whole meal pita for lunch
    3) A small green apple as an afternoon snack
    4) Dinner was a chilli, or some meat or salad. On the advice of a friend I'd removed carbs such as potatoes, bread or rice from dinner as "it's just empty energy and sits in your stomach as you sleep". This may have been the wrong thing to do.

    I think most days i was eating that than 2,000 calories - some days just 1,700. Even at the weekend I would slip a little but not go crazy and eat 9 course meals. The person leading the weight loss course reckons I wasn't eating enough so now I've upped my calorie intake and I am tracking it closely (including weekend).

    As you can imagine it's very frustrating that I've worked hard and not lost any weight - so now I'm reassessing the whole process and I'm properly counting calories (and I've started making sure I eat more) and switching up my gym routine.

    I'll see how it goes but the biggest block to motivation to continue is lack of progress on the scales even when I'm doing everything right.

    I appreciate your input though, and as I say I'm hoping the Fitbit and the calorie counting will give some results




  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 9,979 Member
    There are no empty calories that just sit in your stomach. Everything you eat gets converted to energy that keeps you alive. Ok, I don't know how many calories there are in paper, fingernails and other things, but they too have calories and can provide you with energy. If you body doesn't get energy energy from food it takes this energy from your body, fat and muscle. And if there's too much energy in your food it gets stored as fat and muscle (provided proper muscle training). So if you've neither gained nor lost weight you were eating at maintenance. Simple, right
  • jamiecole6857
    jamiecole6857 Posts: 5 Member
    I worded that badly - said person says eating carbs in the evening makes you fatter because you don't burn off the energy while you sleep so it turns into fat.

    Not sure if the time of day makes a difference, but it seemed a good way to cut down on calories from which you don't get much in the way of vitamins.

    However, on the advice of some experts I'm going back on that now
  • smkopac
    smkopac Posts: 2 Member
    I see that there are many good responses to your post already but I wanted to share a similar experience that I had. About three years ago I lost 20 pounds over the course of a year by using MPF and logging exercise there (mostly by seeing how many calories I should have burned on the elliptical by the machine's estimate, comparing it to MFP's estimate, and then comparing the intensity of other workouts I did to those estimates).


    This spring I got back into MFP, linking my Fitbit Alta HR to my account.

    It was a very different experience from the last time I used MFP. I was amazed that I was always under my calorie budget and never had to go hungry. Hooray! ...except for the fact that I didn't lose any weight. Maybe my Fitbit wasn't calibrated correctly. Who knows. My point is, while I love my Fitbit and it helps keep me moving, the calorie calculations didn't work for me. I've disconnected it from my account and I'm going to see what happens if I just adhere to MFP's calorie estimates for exercise like I did last time.

    TL;DR I lost a bunch of weight with MFP only and now that I linked it to my FB I didn't lose any weight.
  • smkopac
    smkopac Posts: 2 Member
    yirara wrote: »
    There are no empty calories that just sit in your stomach. Everything you eat gets converted to energy that keeps you alive. Ok, I don't know how many calories there are in paper, fingernails and other things, but they too have calories and can provide you with energy. If you body doesn't get energy energy from food it takes this energy from your body, fat and muscle. And if there's too much energy in your food it gets stored as fat and muscle (provided proper muscle training). So if you've neither gained nor lost weight you were eating at maintenance. Simple, right

    Sorry to be a pain but some things don't have calories because our bodies can't break them down. For example lettuce actually has a ton of calories-if you're some organism that can break down the cell walls into glucose. We don't have those enzymes so for us lettuce represents very few calories. I suspect that paper has few to no calories for humans as well. However its still pretty low on my list of low-cal snacks 😂
  • ncfitbit
    ncfitbit Posts: 1,058 Member
    jamiecole6857 wrote: »

    I think most days i was eating that than 2,000 calories - some days just 1,700. Even at the weekend I would slip a little but not go crazy and eat 9 course meals. The person leading the weight loss course reckons I wasn't eating enough so now I've upped my calorie intake and I am tracking it closely (including weekend).

    As you can imagine it's very frustrating that I've worked hard and not lost any weight - so now I'm reassessing the whole process and I'm properly counting calories (and I've started making sure I eat more) and switching up my gym routine.

    I'll see how it goes but the biggest block to motivation to continue is lack of progress on the scales even when I'm doing everything right.

  • ncfitbit
    ncfitbit Posts: 1,058 Member
    jamiecole6857 wrote: »

    As you can imagine it's very frustrating that I've worked hard and not lost any weight - so now I'm reassessing the whole process and I'm properly counting calories (and I've started making sure I eat more) and switching up my gym routine.

    I'll see how it goes but the biggest block to motivation to continue is lack of progress on the scales even when I'm doing everything right.

    I like @WinoGelato's advice about being giving the fitbit some time. I found mine to get more accurate over time as well. And I agree that you are probably at least lightly active.

    You don't say how long you've been counting calories, but I think that is where you probably will see the biggest payoff. Be patient with it and learn all you can. There is a learning curve to it, but if you feel like you've been working hard and seeing no results, this is the best place to focus.

    https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/872212/youre-probably-eating-more-than-you-think/p1
  • singingflutelady
    singingflutelady Posts: 8,736 Member
    Your body burns calories 24/7.
  • ALlvsSkiing
    ALlvsSkiing Posts: 7 Member
    I have a Charge 2 fit bit and a Fenix 5X, after comparing the two for some time, the Fit bit is very very generous for steps, floors climbed and calories burned!
  • Gamliela
    Gamliela Posts: 2,468 Member
    I had a fitbit too, it was exceedingly generous, downright wrong, so I had to give it up. Now I literally count my own steps to make sure my device isn't giving me too many steps.
    Maybe its me but very few pedometers are accurate and researching them hasn't really given me too much confidence. I'm doing pretty well with iphone atm. Best wishes.
    The main thing is to keep moving.
  • ALlvsSkiing
    ALlvsSkiing Posts: 7 Member
    smkopac wrote: »
    yirara wrote: »
    There are no empty calories that just sit in your stomach. Everything you eat gets converted to energy that keeps you alive. Ok, I don't know how many calories there are in paper, fingernails and other things, but they too have calories and can provide you with energy. If you body doesn't get energy energy from food it takes this energy from your body, fat and muscle. And if there's too much energy in your food it gets stored as fat and muscle (provided proper muscle training). So if you've neither gained nor lost weight you were eating at maintenance. Simple, right

    Sorry to be a pain but some things don't have calories because our bodies can't break them down. For example lettuce actually has a ton of calories-if you're some organism that can break down the cell walls into glucose. We don't have those enzymes so for us lettuce represents very few calories. I suspect that paper has few to no calories for humans as well. However its still pretty low on my list of low-cal snacks 😂

    I do not agree with that, we do have the enzymes but make up of some foods just don't have the calories, due to their densities and water volume and fibre.
  • fitcrt
    fitcrt Posts: 76 Member
    I had to unlink my Fitbit from MFP for this very reason. I would have gained a ton of weight if I followed the calories FitBit was giving me in MFP. I still wear the FitBit as a watch and to track my steps, but that’s it. I use a polar chest strap monitor when I exercise and track my workout calories that way instead, it’s much more realistic for me.
  • cathyreames62
    cathyreames62 Posts: 8 Member
    I am new to MFP but have been using a Fitbit HR since they came out. It really helps me as I have a very low resting heat rate. I am doing IM so I wanted a more accurate accountability on my food. My daughter told me MFP was her favorite. I set MFP track steps and exercise to Fitbit and log everything into MFP. I think you calories are to high if you plan on losing weight. You need to set them lower in your MFP. Let Fitbit only track exercise. Not sure if this helps as I am new but it is working for me. Good luck
    Always looking for friends to add.
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