Fitness Tracking

Nooka7523

What do you use for fitness tracking? I have a generic fitness watch and it is not one that fitnesspal recognizes. Which watches are good but inexpensive?

AnnPT77

I can't recommend a brand specifically. I have a Garmin for fitness tracking because it gives me pretty reliable feedback about my athletic performance, but I don't even bother to sync it to MFP even though I could (long story why, won't belabor it here).

Mostly, the sync function is about calorie tracking, not fitness tracking. MFP really isn't a fitness app, other than through the idea that improving fitness relies on eating enough calories (even while losing weight) and getting good nutrition.

If your current fitness watch gives you an all-day calorie burn number, you can use that to adjust your calorie goal. Or, if your fitness tracker gives you exercise calorie estimates for exercise sessions, you can manually log the exercise and use those calorie estimates (ideally recognizing that your device probably tells you gross calories during the exercise time, and you really want to log net calories for that amount of time . . . a thing you can compensate for more roughly by only eating 50-75% of the exercise calories.)

Have you checked whether your current fitness watch is able to sync with one of the health-type apps that can then sync the data over to MFP? There's a list of all the possible apps here:

https://www.myfitnesspal.com/apps

That would also be a way to figure out which watch brands can sync directly, or you could look for a watch that syncs to one of the other apps that then syncs to MFP.

I'm not sure what you'd consider inexpensive. Fitbit and Garmin are probably the most common brands people sync to MFP, and some of their low-end models are much less expensive than their top of the line. Anecdotally, it seems like more people have problems with Fitbit than Garmin, both in how reliably they sync to MFP, plus it seeming like Fitbits are more likely to die young.