Do you eat back all the calories your FitBit gives you?

dancephysics

When I started back in October, I told MFP that I was sedentary, and would like to lose .5 lbs per week, so it gave me 1550 to eat every day. I lost about 10 lbs that way, and was actually losing closer to .8 lbs per week. Like many, I got a FitBIt for Christmas. Turns out, during the week, I am a lot more active than I originally thought. Most days I get to 10,000 steps or beyond without much difficulty, mostly from my job (teacher, kind of), and a little bit from exercise.

Because of all these steps, my FitBit gives me 400-500 extra calories every day. That doesn't seem quite right, so I've not been eating them all back, and on some days my net is sub-1200, even thought my totals are in the 1600-1800 range. I have continued to lose weight at what I think is a reasonable rate, though is a little more than .5 lbs per week.

So, if you have a FitBit, do you eat everything back? If yes, are you continuing to lose weight according to your plan?

fushigi1988

I eat around my FitBit calories, I have it set to maintenance, but I am losing inches (recomp)
So if it says I have a 2500 burn for that day, I tend to be around 2400-2500 with my calories for that day.

WalkingAlong

Would it make more sense to change MFP's settings to 'active' instead? I don't know what difference it'd make, if any.

Dnarules

In all honesty, since you are losing less than a pound a week, it sounds like what you are doing is working. You could add another 100 calories or so every few weeks and see what happens.

Francl27

I used the fitbit to give me an estimate of how much I burn, and set my goal at a 20% deficit from the average. I don't totally trust the fitbit though, sometimes it just doesn't make sense.

p4ulmiller

So, if you have a FitBit, do you eat everything back? If yes, are you continuing to lose weight according to your plan?

No. My calorie target is a target. If I go under, that's OK.

But on the converse, I go over on the odd day too.

The trend is to stay under, and my weight loss trend is downwards. We can overthink this weight loss thing sometimes.

honeysprinkles

My goal is to burn about 2,100 calories a day, but on here I have my activity level to lightly active which puts me around 1880 (for days when I'm not as active). Now that I have a fitbit, I don't pay attention to net calories at all, I just look at my calorie burn for the day and decide what kind of deficit range I want (usually anywhere from 500-750 calories) and eat whatever that is...well, that's my plan at least, I don't always follow it lol. So if I burn around 2100 a day, I try to eat around 1500 or so. I do the same thing on workout days or when I burn more than 2100, I just adjust the amount I eat but still ignore MFP's net calculation because they're considering different things.

aleggett321

I use the average calories burned for each week from the Fitbit as my TDEE and subtract 15% for my daily intake. Doing it that way yiu don't eat back calories from exercise. I only use MFP as a tracker of calorie and macro intake.