Calories burned from steps

haslamhammer

Connected my Fitbit Versa 3 to my fitness pal but it’s only updating my calories from exercise or steps at midnight and not live?? Anyone know a fix it’s pointless me trying to keep track if it’s not live and only updating at midnight
As below picture just states 0

PAV8888

Not sure if the below will help you or not... but throwing it out there in general.

I would also verify that you've connected from MFP to Fitbit. It used to be that the connection from the website was the most solid. But if you've already connected it may be a pain to disconnect and reconnect.

Also if this is the first day I would ignore and wait for the second or third day before considering that I have an issue.

Also are you setup as very active on MFP?
Do you have negative calories enabled?

If you don't have negative calories enabled that may be a reason you are not seeing any updates yet.

Beyond that:

The truth of the matter is that the ACTUAL calories that Fitbit SHOULD add will ONLY be CORRECT at midnight.

Until midnight the estimates will be subject to change and WILL change

The reason is that MFP and Fitbit allocate different amounts of calories to each base minute.

Fibit allocates an Activity Factor to each 5 minute interval based on the activity it detects during that span. Then it multiplies your Mifflin RMR by that Activity Factor and allocates calories. In the late evening when you're sitting on the couch it is assigning Calories at 1x Mifflin RMR. At night it may even dip to 0.95 Mifflin RMR while you're sleeping.

MFP pre-allocates all your "selected" activity setting over the course of the1440 minutes in a 24 hour day.

This means that you get a minimum 1.25x Mifflin RMR for each minute up to midnight. Sleeping, couch or awake and kicking. 1.8x if you're setup as very active.

This means that you will get a large negative adjustment when you wake up, the fitbit will catch up and surpass MFP while you're very active, and then your positive adjustment because of the activity will reduce as time goes on if you don't continue to be active till midnight.

at 16K + steps you pretty much should be hitting very close to MFP's very active setting as an activity factor of 1.8x is at just about that level. 20K steps would be clearly above the 1.8x factor for most.

Depending on how much over the 16K steps you usually go and depending on how large of a deficit you set, how fast you are losing, and how much weight you have available to lose, you may be able to achieve an appropriate deficit regardless of the precision of the connection just by knowing that 16K roughly corresponds to MFP very active in terms of total energy expended and adjusting on the fly even without guidance from the devices.

My personal observation has been that extreme activity tends to be rewarded by Fitbit a bit more than what it is rewarded by the scale

While it still has to be fed appropriately if you don't want to crash and burn, I wouldn't be surprised if, say, activity between 25K and 30K steps is worth a substantial amount, yes, but less of an amount than activity between 10K and 15K in terms of actual calories expended in the context of your complete day.

Part of this could be potentially caused because extreme activity could be suppressing other normal metabolic activity that would have taken place absent that extreme activity. f.e. just being extra tired may slow you down for the rest of your day beyond what you would have slowed down. Or you may start to feel more cold as you get more tired because your core body temp drops. Etc etc.

haslamhammer

Yeah I understand all that, my partner has an older version fit bit and it just ads it straight away as soon as she’s done an exercise or steps etc coz it’s exercise spent and done, it ads the correct amount at midnight from the exercise or steps I’ve done but just won’t put it on live like instant after I’ve done a work out or long walk it should collate calories negative or positive instantly???