Calories in vs calories out

arocha223
arocha223 Posts: 1 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
MFP starts me at 1200 calories.but with everyday activity and exercise I burn between 2700-3200 calories a day based on my fitbit. It is linked to MFP and so it is telling me to eat like 2400 calories a day is that correct? And how do you eat that much in a day I am having a hard time getting 2000 in.

Replies

  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 14,259 Member
    How active (steps etc) are you? how tall/heavy?
    How long have you been doing this?
    What has your weight trend been like?
  • penguinmama87
    penguinmama87 Posts: 1,155 Member
    PAV8888 wrote: »
    How active (steps etc) are you? how tall/heavy?
    How long have you been doing this?
    What has your weight trend been like?

    Yes, all of these matter.

    Many people find over time that their devices overestimate calorie burn. If yours is synced, make sure you aren't also logging exercise on top of that to give you even more calories to eat, because then you're double dipping. (Some people find it helpful, but I ended up unsyncing my device because it got too confusing for me - my calorie goal is based on my typical activity instead, which I like better and has yielded more consistent results.)

    The main thing is: if you eat those calories, do you lose weight over time (at least a few weeks, not just a couple of days) or not?
  • TDFbound
    TDFbound Posts: 4 Member
    arocha223 wrote: »
    MFP starts me at 1200 calories.but with everyday activity and exercise I burn between 2700-3200 calories a day based on my fitbit. It is linked to MFP and so it is telling me to eat like 2400 calories a day is that correct? And how do you eat that much in a day I am having a hard time getting 2000 in.

    I highly doubt you are burning 3000 calories per day. I never account for daily necessary movement when looking at calories, that's essentially part of your base metabolic rate as far as daily calorie tracking is concerned. 3000 calories burned through exercise is like... 4-5 hours of moderate intensity exercise such as zone 2/3 cycling or rowing.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,259 Member
    TDFbound wrote: »
    arocha223 wrote: »
    MFP starts me at 1200 calories.but with everyday activity and exercise I burn between 2700-3200 calories a day based on my fitbit. It is linked to MFP and so it is telling me to eat like 2400 calories a day is that correct? And how do you eat that much in a day I am having a hard time getting 2000 in.

    I highly doubt you are burning 3000 calories per day. I never account for daily necessary movement when looking at calories, that's essentially part of your base metabolic rate as far as daily calorie tracking is concerned. 3000 calories burned through exercise is like... 4-5 hours of moderate intensity exercise such as zone 2/3 cycling or rowing.

    No. Your basal metabolic rate/resting metabolic rate is pretty much what you'd burn flat on your back in bed in a coma.

    Daily life activity (Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis = NEAT) is another few hundred calories on top of BMR/RMR, and can be many hundreds more if someone has an active job, active home chores, etc.

    Exercise calories aren't BMR/RMR or NEAT, so those get added on, too (with some other smaller factors like TEF), to get Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE), our total calorie need (to maintain weight) for the day.

    OP is saying 2700-3200 calories total burn, i.e., TDEE of 2700-3200. That's not implausible out of hand. It depends on her size, her job, her home chores, her exercise, and maybe even how average she is, because TDEE/NEAT/BMR/RMR estimates are averages for similar people, and not every individual is average. That's true even when a tracker is giving a very personalized estimate. It could be right, it could be high, it could be low. Logging experience will tell, once she has multiple weeks of data.

    I've been tracking for almost 8 years now, just under a year of loss, and the rest maintenance since. Based on my tracking experience over that time, my TDEE is usually somewhere in the 2100-2500 range, depending on season and the day's exercise (200-500 exercise calories, typically, 6 days a week). That's for a 5'5" woman, currently 131-point-something pounds, 67 years old, sedentary or close outside of the exercise.

    I have no idea what my actual BMR/RMR is (never lab-measured), but the calculators put it somewhere in the 1135-1488 range. I'd put a higher likelihood on 1300-1400 being closer because reasons, but if that's true there's still around a thousand calories a day coming in there somewhere, and most of it isn't exercise. Whatever it is, my good brand/model tracker - one that others here gives them a reasonably accurate TDEE estimate - is several hundred calories low compared to my real-world experience, and so is MFP.

    Just for academic interest: I can't hold the pace for multiple hours, but Concept 2 claims machine rowing at 2:30 per 500m (not all that fast, unless you're a li'l ol' lady rower like me) is worth about 650 calories per hour for a 175-pound person, so about 4.6 hours of rowing. (They say that pace would be 580 calories per hour for me.) So you're close, with the 4-5 hour estimate for 3000 exercise calories.

    But OP isn't claiming 3000 calories of exercise. She's saying Fitbit estimates 2700-3200 calories of TDEE. That's a completely different claim. We don't have enough information to evaluate it for reasonableness. If she's a floor nurse, construction worker, warehouse picker, waitstaff, or something like that, it could happen, especially if exercising besides.
  • mtaratoot
    mtaratoot Posts: 14,277 Member
    TDFbound wrote: »
    arocha223 wrote: »
    MFP starts me at 1200 calories.but with everyday activity and exercise I burn between 2700-3200 calories a day based on my fitbit. It is linked to MFP and so it is telling me to eat like 2400 calories a day is that correct? And how do you eat that much in a day I am having a hard time getting 2000 in.

    I highly doubt you are burning 3000 calories per day. I never account for daily necessary movement when looking at calories, that's essentially part of your base metabolic rate as far as daily calorie tracking is concerned. 3000 calories burned through exercise is like... 4-5 hours of moderate intensity exercise such as zone 2/3 cycling or rowing.

    I am 5'7" and currently about 140 pounds. It's not uncommon for me to hit 3000 calories of burn in a day even if my only "activity" is walking. Then again, I like to walk.

  • cryonic_273
    cryonic_273 Posts: 81 Member
    Trackers sometimes include base metabolic energy - MFP in settings has a section asking our general activity level. If you chose active its building in a higher base metabolic rate - and adding all your fitbit exercise on top means some of the excercise is effective counted twice.

    If you are adding exercise i find it better to set the base activity to low and then add all the activities via fitbit or manually.
  • mtaratoot
    mtaratoot Posts: 14,277 Member
    cryonic_273 wrote: »
    Trackers sometimes include base metabolic energy - MFP in settings has a section asking our general activity level. If you chose active its building in a higher base metabolic rate - and adding all your fitbit exercise on top means some of the excercise is effective counted twice.

    If you are adding exercise i find it better to set the base activity to low and then add all the activities via fitbit or manually.

    This is EXACTLY why I selected "sedentary" when I used MFP to figure out my base calorie level. I have had pretty good results letting my Garmin device track my calories out. For simple things like walking, it does a good job whether or not I tell it I am "going for a walk." I've worn it long enough that it now even knows if I'm riding my bike even if I don't tell it I am. I presume it's the accelerometers that figure that out.

    If I do tell my device I'm "going for a walk," I get less credit for steps taken over and above that walk until I hit some higher number of steps. I find that interesting, but it seems to work. I think if I actually had MFP set to some other setting than sedentary, Garmin might talk to it and not credit exercise calories until I hit a certain threshold. Since things are working fine the way they are, I just leave them.

    A quick check of Sailrabbit from time to time to noodle around with the activity settings and compare the TDEE estimates to what MFP tells me for different days also seems to jibe.
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 14,259 Member
    cryonic_273 wrote: »
    Trackers sometimes include base metabolic energy - MFP in settings has a section asking our general activity level. If you chose active its building in a higher base metabolic rate - and adding all your fitbit exercise on top means some of the excercise is effective counted twice.

    If you are adding exercise i find it better to set the base activity to low and then add all the activities via fitbit or manually.

    The MFP exercise adjustment (when integration is working correctly) is NOT really an exercise adjustment--it is a TDEE adjustment-- and takes care of all this by adjusting the FINAL CALORIES AT MIDNIGHT to be equal to the tracker provided TDEE.

    Regardless of starting points on MFP.

    All that happens in the situation you describe (not set at sedentary) is that the adjustments are larger to the negative and smaller to the positive.

    The only discrepancy would be introduced by manually entered exercise on MFP.

    When using a tracker I would suggest, strongly, unless you fully understand what you're doing in which case you wouldn't care to be reading this, to only enter exercise and activities on the tracker and food on mfp.

    I would even double down and suggest that if your exercise activities are generally speaking well recognized by the tracker--let it do things automatically.

    Most trackers over-ride their detection based on what you enter manually. So you should have a good idea as to why you are over-riding the tracker's automatic estimate with your own entry.
  • mtaratoot
    mtaratoot Posts: 14,277 Member
    @PAV8888

    Thanks!

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