BodyMedia Fit

I have had the BodyMedia Fit Link armband for about 3 weeks now. I am nowhere near an expert on it, but I can tell you what I have found in my experience. A couple of my MFP friends are much more savvy than I am, as I'm sure many people are.

To answer your questions (to the best of my ability):

I keep reading there are a ton of technical problems and people can't sync it properly. Has this been fixed or do people still have problems?

MFP has given you the ability to turn off the negative calorie adjustment. I don't know how to get the two things to talk to one another so that my BodyMedia food goal is my MFP goal. I have "solved" the problem myself by setting my MFP goal to 800 calories and making sure to eat everything back. When I wake up in the morning and plug my BMF into the computer, it gives me anywhere between 450-500 calories that feeds into MFP. I have not done anything for the day yet except sleep and get up to use the bathroom. I set my MFP goal at 800 because if I do absolutely no exercise for the day I don't want to eat above 1250-1300. I'm not sure if there is a better way, but it works for me. As I am active throughout the day and exercise, more calories get added in and I can eat more. Usually anywhere from 800-1,000 total so I am actually eating around 1600-1800 per day depending on how active I am. (Hopefully this make some sense)


I think I want to Link so I can sync it to my iphone. I heard I can record food in MFP but it will just transfer over the calories and the macros to BodyMedia, not the actual food items, correct?

I have the Link and an iphone. I have a lot of trouble getting the armband to be recognized by the Bluetooth on my phone, but that could just be my office being sort of a dead zone. It will only transfer the calorie and macro information. It will list the meals and then say MyFitnessPal and calorie information, but not the foods. It's good enough for me though. No complaints here about this.

Also, if at the end of the week you have a 3500 calorie deficit can you really see a pound loss on the scale, is it that accurate?

After I read your post, I made a spreadsheet to see how accurate it is. Now...I only have another pound to lose, so my results may not be the same as someone with more weight to lose, but I have been using the BMF for 18 days.

My stats:
Calories Burned
46,486
Calories Consumed
32,992
Calorie Deficit
13,494

If you take the calorie deficit of 13, 494 and divide by 3500, then you get 3.85 pounds that I should have lost. I lost 1.4 pounds. Again, at the time I only had 3 pounds to lose in total, so I don't think that my results are typical.

I would highly recommend it even with its "flaws". It gives me a really accurate picture of my calories during the day. Before the BMF I had been struggling to lose those last few pounds and afraid to change my calorie intake. I could relax more once I knew what my real numbers were.

Good luck and hopefully you'll get more answers.

Note-To be fair 4 of the days that I counted were not "typical" in that it was Thanksgiving week and I ate what I wanted (still logging), but they were definitely higher calorie days than normal. I don't know if this would have an impact on my weigh loss or not, but I wanted to disclose.

Another question... do you have to connect USB to have BFM Link update the dashboard? I see the sync button on the app after the bluetooth pulls the data from the band. I dont see the dashboard updating online until i plug in to charge?

We got the same set up! I also use Nike+ running app, nano or the GPS sportswatch to track my runs with heart rate mon.

So I guess the phone app cant push the BT data to the server for BFM at this point?

So someone explain this to me (I am also considering the BodyMedia stuff) if I "upload" my calories burned from my arm band to my phone it won't update the information on the website?

The latest BMF App will allow you to upload the data, once you connect via bluetooth to your smartphone. There is a white arrow (right top side), click that, and your current data will upload to the web site.