Food diary - My calories are disappearing?

katiesmom_99

I planned dinner based on my available calories after work. With Fitbit's adjustment, it said I had 'earned' 105 extra calories through exercise. My cals and macros were on the nose or barely under across the board with the meal I chose.

Fast forward a couple of hours. I've had dinner and logged a snack for the night. Only now it says I only have 42 bonus calories from exercise. Even after closing the diary, bonus calories continue to go down, putting me over my allowance for the day.

I made sure that negative adjustments was turned off in my settings when I set up the Fitbit. So is this a glitch in the system? A calorie goblin stealing my exercise numbers? Will it just keep reducing my numbers until it resets for a new day?

I use the daily numbers as a personal challenge, sort of a game to see how close I can get. It's aggravating to see them suddenly change, and I'm ready to just unlink the Fitbit and stick to the MFP cals.

collectingblues

It’s normal. The Fitbit adjustment presumed that you’re going to maintain that level of activity throughout the day. So when you don’t, it adjusts down so that what you’re allowed marches up with what you actually burned. For people who are more active in the morning, that means that you don’t really have all of the calories it says you do.

PAV8888

You should enable negative calories unless each and every day you KNOW your Fitbit will say you have burned more calories than your MFP level expects you to.

The adjustments are final at midnight.

Do you want to know the secret formula?

For every minute of complete inactivity before midnight MFP is giving you BMR * 1.25 (1.4/1.6/1.8) depending on the activity level you've set yourself up as.

BUT, for every minute of complete inactivity before midnight FITBIT will only give you BMR * 1.0 Calories.

Now you can estimate how many calories you will lose if you go to sleep instead of continuing to burn calories at the level you told MFP you would!

katiesmom_99

@PAV8888 Thanks for the insight.

Today I have been on my feet standing/walking since 7:00 a.m., work, grocery shopping, meal prep, and cooking. It's now going on 6 p.m. and I'm just sitting down for the first time aside from driving. I would be mentally and physically kaput if I tried to keep up the same pace until midnight! Fitbit has only registered a little over 6K steps, so no adjustments. It seems like I should have burned a lot more calories than the 650 I have left for dinner.

Lillymoo01

katiesmom_99 wrote: »

@PAV8888 Thanks for the insight.

Today I have been on my feet standing/walking since 7:00 a.m., work, grocery shopping, meal prep, and cooking. It's now going on 6 p.m. and I'm just sitting down for the first time aside from driving. I would be mentally and physically kaput if I tried to keep up the same pace until midnight! Fitbit has only registered a little over 6K steps, so no adjustments. It seems like I should have burned a lot more calories than the 650 I have left for dinner.

It doesn't calculate based on how active you have been already through the day but the activity level you set with MFP. Just pulling numbers from thin air, it will calculate based on you doing 300 steps every single hour, including when you are asleep if you are set to sedentary. If you have negative adjustments enabled you will find you start the day with negative calories but this will steadily increase during the day. However, at night as you wind down and become less active you will find those calories slowly go down (or quickly if you have set your activity level at highly active).

PAV8888

sounds like today your fitbit did not recognize all your steps. Arm movement, impact generated by the steps and other issues discussed here: https://help.fitbit.com/articles/en_US/Help_article/1141#steps may be influencing your step count!