Is it appropriate to track additional activities?

ldangelina

I have a FitBit Blaze which tracks my steps, though I don't know how accurately. There are many days when I'm working all day in my tiny kitchen, not taking many steps, but definitely moving around and just... doing. (mostly baking and food prep). I have another calculator app for different activities such as grocery shopping, housecleaning, and many, many more. It seems to be fairly accurate as my current weight is taken into account for each caloric calculation.

My question is, does tracking these low- no-step activities in addition to what the FitBit tracks skew my results?

dewd2

I only track exercise. Everything else is just 'life'.

spiriteagle99

Same for me. Deliberate exercise I log, other activity is just part of living. If you regularly do a lot of activity that isn't exercise as such, that becomes part of your activity level i.e. someone who spends the day looking after a toddler may be active or lightly active, depending.

MohsenSALAH

dewd2 wrote: »

I only track exercise. Everything else is just 'life'.

+1

AnnPT77

If you got your calorie goal from MFP, that already includes some amount of movement, based on whatever you put as your "activity level" (sedentary, lightly active, etc.). You would normally want to set that based on your average daily life activities, then log only intentional exercise.

With trackers that give you an all-day calorie burn estimate, synching those to MFP is one option. If you're only getting steps from the Blaze (not an all-day calorie burn), I'd be inclined to suggest using the "routine life" steps to gauge your activity level setting, then just logging intentional exercise.

By counting lots of daily-life activity explicitly, you run the risk of double-counting, depending on how you derived your calorie goal. That may not be an issue when a person has quite a bit of weight remaining to lose, but can be problematic as the person gets lighter and has less wiggle room.

NorthCascades

Same as everyone else so far in this thread.

It's been a long time since I've had a Fitbit. I use a Garmin, I record deliberate exercise with it, and then that syncs to MFP. Garmin has a calendar feature that's actually pretty useful. I wouldn't want to clutter it, make the stuff I'm interested in harder to find. I don't know if Fitbit has that kind of feature, but I know their app is pretty good, so maybe.