Calibrating your BMF

Depictureboy

I have found that its important to calibrate the BMF. I have been using a suggestion by heybales to calibrate my BMF down and i have been noticing a difference.

First using a site like scoobys or heybales' spreadsheet you need to know your BMR(preferably your Katch BMR)

then take your daily graph and narrow down to 3 hours of steady inactivity(preferably when you are sleeping; I use the same time every day from 1am to 4am) take the average calories burned and divide it by 180 to get your calorie per minute burned. Then multiply that by 1440(minutes in 24hours) to get the BMR that is being used by the BMF for calculations....mine was really high. Then start cranking your height down(or up if it was low) a couple inches at a time(depending on your needs) then let it set for a week, while you keep track of the change. Then repeat until your BMF BMR is in line with your Calculated BMR. As you lose weight you will need to adjust the process every so often, but it should be a snap.

lisab64mfp

Sounds complicated. Very glad that BMF is accurate for me w/my actual measurements. Very glad that you are getting it to work for you though!

Depictureboy

its really not, takes me like 3 minutes to check and verify...just sounds like it...but i'm a data junkie...to each their own.

happycauseIride

its really not, takes me like 3 minutes to check and verify...just sounds like it...but i'm a data junkie...to each their own.

I'm a data and numbers junkie too. I will check this out. Thanks for sharing.

tinkystyle

Thanks for posting this. So far, I'm having success with mine. But I may need to do this at some point.

Spresto2

Great info for BodyMedia users. I'm going to definitely try this. thanks!

iwishihad

Oh gosh .... my Katch BMR is SOOOO much lower than BMF or MFP! I'll be tweaking with the new numbers and hopefully the scale will start moving again! (Now ... once I have it set with BMF, how do I get right on MFP? Any ideas?)

oonga

i am NOT a numbers junkie! quite the opposite really LOL
But how do you find what the BMF has your BMR set at??

also for a numbers nob to work out the average of the 3 days of 4 hours is to add up the 3 days then divide by 3, correct??
so say it says for the 3days between midnight and 4am i burnt
220 cals
210 cals
250 cals

it would be 680 divided by 3 = 226 .... yes? no?

tigerblue

I was not able to sufficiently lower my BMF using height to match what my BMR really is. I got down to showing my height at around 3 feet, and still it read too high. Through careful record keeping over about 15 months, I finally figured out that the BMF is only 69% accurate for me. That means on an average day, it reads about 750 calories too high. So I have set my MFP goal at 1000 calories below what it generates as my maintenance. This results in a 250 calorie deficit, which gives me a loss of around 1/2 a lb per week (actually a little less. Probably because of logging inaccuracies).

I am glad I have finally found out how to use the expensive device in a way thatis helpful. For the first year, all it helped me do was gain weight!

In my opinion 69% accuracy is not acceptable, especially considering how expensive the thing is. I contacted the company and they were not helpful at all. Basically just brushed me off in a way that was barely polite.

Many people ask me about my armband. I tell them not to waste their money.