High school senior trying to get healthy for college

shainabotwin
shainabotwin Posts: 8 Member
in Introduce Yourself
Hello all,

I'm a current high school senior trying to change my look and my life for college. I've been overweight my whole life - tried everything. Nutritionists, Weight Watchers, camps, anything you can think of. I've been on MFP for about a month and a half and I've lost around 10lbs (but gained a ton of muscle!). I'm doing 65 minutes of cardio on the Precor AMT 835 6 or 7 days a week, and my FitLinxx strength routine 5-6 times per week. I just got a Fitbit Zip today to more accurately try to tell me how many calories I burn (my machine is telling me ~1200 which I know is a huge overestimate) so I don't completely overeat. I'd love to hear some feedback on how well the Fitbit works with MFP and any tips that anyone has!

Replies

  • editorgrrl
    editorgrrl Posts: 7,060 Member
    Here's something I wrote in the "Fitbit Users" group:
    http://www.myfitnesspal.com/forums/show/1307-fitbit-users

    When you set up your MFP account, you specified an activity level: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/account/change_goals_guided MFP used your answer, plus your age, sex & height, to estimate how many calories you burn every day (your TDEE). Then you set your weight-loss goal, and MFP subtracted the appropriate deficit to calculate your daily calorie goal.

    Once you link an activity tracker to your MFP account (via the "Apps" tab at the top of every page), you start getting calorie adjustments. If your tracker says you burned more calories than MFP estimated, you get a positive adjustment (meaning more calories to eat). If you enable negative calorie adjustments and you burn less than the MFP estimate, you will lose calories. (But negative calorie adjustments will never drop your daily calories below 1,200.)

    I wasn't losing much weight when I got my first activity tracker. At first, the adjustments didn't seem very accurate. But they got better, almost as if the system was "learning" my routine. It took a lot of trial & error to find the settings that worked best for me. But then everything clicked. I changed my MFP settings from sedentary to lightly active (even though I have a desk job), and now my adjustments are pretty minimal. And I'm losing!

    I find my step goal really motivating. If I get home at night and see I'm thisclose to making goal, I'll walk around the block. A little bit more every day really adds up.
  • shainabotwin
    shainabotwin Posts: 8 Member
    I just got my Fitbit Zip tonight, so I haven't gotten a chance to use it while I'm at the gym. When it comes to entering my exercise on MFP... do I continue to do that? I know MFP automatically syncs with my Fitbit (yes, I did set it up). So do I continue to manually enter my exercise into MFP, or will my Fitbit just automatically sync the number of calories that I've burned onto my MFP app?
  • editorgrrl
    editorgrrl Posts: 7,060 Member
    Log food & drink in MFP. Don't log step-based exercise. Non-step based exercise (like swimming or spinning) can be logged either in Fitbit or in MFP--never both. If you choose to log in MFP, you'll be asked for start & end times. Then MFP overrides your step data during that time.

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