Results Eating Back FitBit Calories

biancamuyis

My Stats: F|5'9|205| Applied Activity Level: Sedentary| Goal to Lose 2lbs/week| Calorie Goal: 1220

Hello all! I want to experiment with the extra calories given to me with the FitBit adjusment feature, but I'm unsure about trusting how much extra it allows me to eat! So I wanted to ask if anyone could share if they had consistent weight loss when eating these calories back. I get about 20k steps a day, and fitbit gives me 1,000 to 1,300 extra calories. I have been having lower energy with the extra steps but the idea that I can eat that much is still a bit mind boggling!

stephnstars

hey there! I sync my fitbit to myfitnesspal and have set it at 1lb to lose and sedentary... i eat some of my cals back that fitbit give me (not all) - although I do have a cheat day now and again!

I have been doing this since April and I have lost 25lbs so its working for me. And works out at roughly 1lb a week. My MFP cals is 1650 daily but I usually eat 2200 and make sure I get some exercise in or at least 15,000 steps of im not working out that day.

sassysmom35

I have a Garmin and yesterday I got 21500 steps including a mile and a half run and it only gave me 800 extra calories. I'm way shorter than you however (5'3). I don't generally eat all those calories back but yesterday and today I have. I know it's not fat but the scale has gone from 164.8 to 173 in 48 hours. It has to be the extra food and water retention but man is it discouraging. I find that when I eat more than 25% of my earned calories that I do not lose. At all. Over months even and that's with weighing all my food and being careful to err on the side of caution when I can't. But then some people here eat back every single one and lose fine. So if I were you I'd eat back a portion...still losing as expected? Eat a few more. Until you find what you can eat back and still lose at your desired rate. Good luck.

PAV8888

20K steps denotes a level of activity that is above MFPs very active setting if you consider them all as daily living activity and do not enter them as a discrete exercise.

I am hiding a few columns that do not apply to your question but assuming you log carefully, assuming you are engaged in activities your Fitbit is good at detecting, and assuming that you are one of the majority of people who tracks close to the population means... then there is little reason to totally distrust until your own logging and feedback over 4-6 weeks tells you that you should. It helps if you look at your weight as a trend (you can connect your Fitbit account to trendweight.com, or use Libra, or Happy Scale or similar)

Note that I compare my implicit TDEE derived from my food logging and actual weight change results to the Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) given by Fitbit and not to the Fitbit adjustment.

The "fitbit adjustment" you see on MFP is the mathematical difference between that Fitbit TDEE value and what MFP expected your total to be for the day. It is an accounting adjustment that does not reflect any particular exercise.

zebasschick

i do better using the MFP exercise feature rather than fitbit, which just showed that me going on as fast a walk as i could go - literally - was moderate exercise. my heart rate monitor and breathing increase say otherwise.

janejellyroll

I eat back 100% of my Fitbit adjustments. Have been doing this since 2015 and my weight has behaved exactly as expected (lost weight in 2015, have been maintaining since then).

Dogmom1978

I don’t trust my Fitbit. I use it to track sleep and heart rate.

I enter my exercise separately into MFP.

Some people go with what Fitbit says and it works, some take a certain percentage off for possible error, etc. It’s going to be some trial and error to see what works for YOU.

Jacq_qui

I eat some (not usually all) of my calories back if I am hungry, but leave them if I don't. It's given me room to eat according to how hungry I am!

I'd hit a month where my weight hadn't moved much when I decided to try it and was quite anxious about gaining, but actually I found that in the first few weeks I lost more weight than the previous four - Suspect that could well be because I was paying really close attention to how and what I logged though.

sarahbetherck

I eat back some, but rarely all, of my FitBit calories (unless I'm honestly so hungry that I need them!)

heybales

You can tweak Fitbit setting of stride-length if needed to improve the daily activity calorie burn.
Not everyone matches the default setting based on gender & height. Long legs, short legs, amount overweight leads to shorter strides and changes as weight lost, ect.
With that many steps, the inaccuracy in distance seen is very meaningful.
Since calories is from distance - it can matter.

Some have an issue if HR increasing enough that it slips into exercise mode and uses HR-based calorie burn - which is badly inflated at the bottom of the exercise zone.
This would apply to walking workouts that would be best calculated by distance not HR calorie burn.
Here again, if lots of those steps bumps you up into exercise mode - inflated.

But after tweaks that MFP adjustment is just the difference between your selected Activity level from 4 rough choices, and what Fitbit reported actually seeing what you do.

Even for workouts - for most people their workouts are really a small % of their weekly calories burn, even if it was inflated by 25% say.

But for your experiment - to test the burn side you gotta log great on the eat side.

Orphia

janejellyroll wrote: »

I eat back 100% of my Fitbit adjustments. Have been doing this since 2015 and my weight has behaved exactly as expected (lost weight in 2015, have been maintaining since then).

Same here, except I switched from Fitbit to Garmin in 2017. Weight does what I think it should, going by the calories I know I eat.

I eat back 100% of exercise calories, otherwise I'm creating an unsustainable deficit or goal.

heybales wrote: »

[...]But for your experiment - to test the burn side you gotta log great on the eat side.

Yes, or have caloric awareness if your logging isn't spot on.