Fitbit Calories Burned

500 for the whole day so far? I usually hit the 50% mark by now (1300 burned)!

I am admittedly not familiar with how fitbit itself works but a lot of calorie counter devices do not subtract your BMR from the reported value.

What I mean is lets say you go jogging for an hour and the device says 300 calories burned. Now lets say you sat on your *kitten* for an hour and did absolutely nothing, the device would say "300 calories burned". Why? Because most of these devices queue off your heart beat and your heart is beating even if you aren't doing anything at all.

What that means is although it said you burned 600 calories exercising really you only burned 300 above what you would have if you had done nothing at all.

Not sure that's the issue with fitbit, again not sure how that device works, but it could be.

Fitbit tracks your TDEE so your BMR + any activity is included.

ETA: Fitbit is also not a heart rate monitor.

I have probably walked total for the day about 45mins at a quick pace (walking dog, walking to the store) , the rest was just daily activity. Could it be that I really burned that much??

As long as your stats are up-to-date (current weight, correct height, etc.) I don't see why not.

I have usually burned around 480 cals by the time I wake up in the morning. This is because the fitbit logs every calorie not just "extra" ones. You burn approximately 1 calorie a minute (depending on age height, weight etc) so even when sleeping or lying down - as long as you are breathing - you are burning calories. Any extra walks, exercise etc is just added in. If you look at your fitbit dashboard graphs you will see how many calories burned and when. Hope this helps you a bit.

Fitbit tracks your TDEE so your BMR + any activity is included.

ETA: Fitbit is also not a heart rate monitor.

Okay thanks for the info.

Then yes jyucymisslucy understand that when your fitbit tells you you have burned 500 calories it is including the calories you would have burned just from being alive which, dependent on the exercise and the amount of time spent, could be a large portion of that number.

If you want to know (within the accuracy of the device) how many calories you are burning from the exercise itself then do this:

Step 1) Put on your fitbit and perform the exercise, note the number of calories it reports you burned AND the amount of time you spent.

Step 2) Put on your fitbit and just sit or do your normal daily things no exercise for the exact same amount of time you spent excercising and then record how many calories it said you burned.

Step 3) Subtract the calories burned in step 1 from the calories burned in step 2 and that's how many calories that exercise burned.


As an example:

I put on my fitbit and go for a 30 min run, it says I burn 500 calories.
I put on my fitbit and watch TV for 30 min, it says I burn 150 calories.

That means my run burned 350 calories.

I'm @ 1270 so far today with 4000+ steps.

It's going to depend on how much you weigh how many calories you burn. Someone who is carrying more weight will burn more calories doing the same activity as someone who is carrying less weight. That being said I wouldn't eat back ALL the calories that the Fitbit give you unless you are tracking daily with a spreadsheet and can confirm that your weight lost jives with your calorie deficit. I know for me the fitbit still OVERESTIMATES my TDEE by about 200 / day which at my weight is enough to put me into maintenance instead of losing - which is why I no longer use it for exercise calories.

Your Fitbit burn is your TDEE. Way more accurate than any online calculator. MFP has a Fitbit Users group: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/forums/show/1307-fitbit-users

Edited to add an explanation of Fitbit calorie adjustments:

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 & weight, to estimate how many calories you burn every day (not including exercise). 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 http://www.myfitnesspal.com/account/diary_settings 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.)

Your FitBit gives you calories burned in 5 minute intervals all day long. If you leave the FitBit sitting in a drawer it will still burn calories at your BMR rate. Mine is on my bedside table while I sleep, the activity log shows that I burned 6.1 calories every 5 minutes while I was sleeping. That means I burned 420 calories before I ever got out of bed this morning. When I checked a few minutes ago it said I have burned 1679 calories with 8530 steps. That includes 320 calories from my stationary bike ride that I entered into MFP.

I have found the TDEE calculated by FitBit to be very accurate.

So just to absolutely clarify in case i missed something. If my fitbit automatically syncs to my MFP account, and i put all my food in as well. i can trust my 'net' calories on my front page? If so, I am massively undereating

The only exercise I log on fitbit/mfp are any circuit training dvds, and I always log from the exact time I started until the exact time I finished. Thanks all for the replies

Then I would suggest putting on your fitbit right now while you are not exercising and let it log for the same amount of time as your circuit training DVD then see how many calories it says you have burned. If you subtract that number from the number of calories it says you burn from your workout that would be the number of calories you burn BECAUSE of the workout.

Aaron you are way overcomplicating it. IME the Fitbit website takes into account the BMR element of exercise in its exercise database if additional exercise (eg running or swimming ie anything not walking) so the TDEE is pretty accurate (normal person to person biological variances excepted of course). Calorie burn is significantly lower than here and lower than my HRM but roughly equal to HRM+BMR for that time period.

I have been using my Fitbit One and the Fitbit website (to log any exercise activity other than walking) to calculate my TDEE for 9 months now. I log this in a spreadsheet and also my calorie intake. My weightloss corresponds pretty closely( ie within approx 2-3%) of what I would expect to be seeing based on 1lb = 3500cals (variances probably through me guesstimating weight of veg or losing count of beer intake on a night out!). So I'm pretty confident that the process works (as long as the Fitbit is set up with weight, heigh, age, walking stride & running stride length).

Sunday I took my Flex off to charge it and forgot to put it on again until sometime the next day. When I got my weekly report, it said Sunday was My Most Active Day!! How's that for accuracy!