FITBIT is whack!!!

How much do you exercise? I have my FitBit TDEE set to 2,500 and I can reach that easily by just walking my dog for an hour after my normal day of work (but I also weigh a lot more than you).

It doesn't matter if it's part of your daily routine or not, moving that much and being active burns more calories than if you were just sitting. Your activity level is very high; 16,000 steps is fantastic! Have you tested it on a "rest" day where you don't walk anywhere? I would suggest doing that to see what your step count and daily burn is. Then you'd see how all of your routine movement adds up!

i walk about 12km per day. i walk my son to school, then i walk back, then i pick him up (walk again) then we walk back. that alone is about 4km. i live in europe so i very rarely use my car. so...i walk to the market, to the local farmer to pick up eggs and fresh produce, to the post office, etc. i average about 16,000 steps per day. but i don't know if that all should be considered exercise anyway since it IS part of my regular daily routine. then 3 days a week, i do resistance training with either weights or resistance bands. i'm not an extremist by any means. i'm just doing enough to make me "tired" before bed...if that makes sense.

You're doing a LOT of exercise everyday. Even if it is routine it is still exercise and you should be making sure you're eating enough to just fuel yourself for your daily routine.

I've had my fitbit over 2 years and I average 11,500 steps daily and my daily burn averages to 1800. On a high day when I get 20,000 steps (my day off work) I barely hit 2000 calories. I'm only just over 5 feet tall though. But I've used that fat2fit radio calculation and it seems to be in agreement that 1800 calories would be my maintenance. I work a desk job 4 days a week and drive my car to work in another town. But I live in a small town and take advantage of walking to the store vs. driving I would love to walk everywhere but it's not convenient here.

How much do you exercise? I have my FitBit TDEE set to 2,500 and I can reach that easily by just walking my dog for an hour after my normal day of work (but I also weigh a lot more than you).

ditto.

I think it sounds about right. I average 11-13K steps/day, anywhere from 2100-2300 cal burned usually. So I think for your steps and activity level, around 2500 TDEE would be right. I do put strength training or other non-step activities in MFP and it will adjust for those calories in both systems. It may not just add them to your TDEE - if you are wearing your FitBit while you are doing them, it is recording some movement and some exertion - by entering what you did in MFP with the start and stop time, it then reconciles that activity with what FitBit already "noticed". Like if I do an exercise DVD with circuit training - FitBit tracks that and my cals and steps go up, but when I put it in MFP it now realizes what kind of movement it was - sometimes I get a positive adjustment and sometimes the FitBit adjustment goes down on MFP because it is "crediting" me for that type of activity. Not sure if that makes sense, you kind of just have to put it in and see how it works a few times and then you will start to trust it.

I'm also encouraged by your comments about how many steps you get in day to day life in Europe - we are going to be spending a month in Florence and I am hoping all the walking we will be doing with no car will offset all the pasta, wine and gelato I'm going to be eating!

Also - you should definitely take this opportunity to eat more!

i walk about 12km per day.

Yes, the Fitbit is right. That's about 700 calories a day just from walking.

just to give background, i got the fitbit because i honestly thought my HRM was crazy. my HRM was pretty much giving me the same amounts for calories burned as my fitbit during my walks. i'm not a slow walker by any means either. i don't do this "walking 15min per km - walking the dog" pace. my average pace is about 9min per km so my heart rate is 140-150ish. time is tickin'! LOL!

I'm confused about your confusion. You basically runwalk 7-8 miles a day and are astonished that you burn basically sedentary TDEE + 700-800 calories a day?

Changing the MFP activity setting will only change the adjustments you see during the day, when MFP is estimating calorie burn for the remainder of the day. At the end of the day, the adjustment will be the same no matter what MFP's activity setting is. You want to choose the activity setting that causes the adjustment to vary the least as time goes by.

^ This. The math is the same, at the end of the day you will end up with the same number of calories alotted if you have MFP and FitBit set up properly (same goals in both). What I found when I raised from Sedentary to Lightly Active was still about 300-400 cal adjustments that I had to figure out what to do with. When I changed to "Active" in MFP, which I move less than you so I think you probably are "Active" not "Lightly Active" I have a much higher starting number and my adjustments sometimes are only around 100-200 cal for just a normal day.

I also have negative calories enabled which you probably want to do also, since on the weekends you move far less. Very rarely have I ended up with a truly negative FitBit adjustment at the end of the day, but throughout the day, if I am sedentary at work, then the adjustment is negative, until I work out later. But since I know this is going to happen, I am still able to plan my day and be pretty close to where I need to be at bed time.

I'm wondering exactly how a FitBit works.. if it's just an accelerometer, what if I tend to gesticulate wildly throughout the day? Is it going to think I'm running a marathon when I'm just sitting down and describing a zombie attack?

I like the idea of the wristband, but I feel it would give me incorrect data with how spazzy I tend to be.

I have my fitbit synced with My Fitness Pal. I only log my food in MFP.
My fitness pal will do a Fitbit calorie adjustment automatically, providing they are synced and you only log food in MFP.

just to give background, i got the fitbit because i honestly thought my HRM was crazy. my HRM was pretty much giving me the same amounts for calories burned as my fitbit during my walks. i'm not a slow walker by any means either. i don't do this "walking 15min per km - walking the dog" pace. my average pace is about 9min per km so my heart rate is 140-150ish. time is tickin'! LOL!

Your walking pace is ~4.1mph or ~6.6kph. So yeah, your heart rate's gonna get up there and definitely yeah, you're going to burn a lot of calories.

I have found my FitBit and MFP TDEEs to be very close to one another most days. They are also pretty close to what the TDEE calculators come up with for me. They are also very close to what my TDEE is calculated to be based on actual weight loss.

Are you syching your FitBit with MFP? I do so and allow positive adjustments only. This gives you extra calories if the FitBit thinks you've burned more than MFP, but you don't get calories taken away if the FitBit number is lower. If your FitBit is consistently higher than MFP, perhaps you have your MFP activity level set too low.

i should basically be eating like 2200 (based on fitbit's 2400 daily projection) calories because i'm only doing a deficit of 10%.

Wait, there is great ability to confuse things when trying to sync Fitbit's TDEE method to MFP's non-exercise maintenance method - and then not actually use MFP's eating goal but your own manual eating goal.

So you got an average TDEE then (which isn't accurate since you don't log strength training) from Fitbit and took 10% that figure, and manually set your MFP eating goal to that?

And now you also sync the Fitbit over?

So here's the problem if you indeed do that, which many do.

You based an eating goal on TDEE that includes most of your exercise.

If MFP sees a TDEE from Fitbit higher than it's non-exercise maintenance, it then adjusts the eating level up.

Doing a setup like that wrong will cause you to wipe out your deficit, because in essence you are eating back exercise calories you already accounted for.

That caught my attention, want to confirm you did it right.
You can either unsync accounts and just manually correct for lifting on Fitbit site.
Or do some setup on MFP so you are kind of maintaining that 10% deficit to TDEE.

And from the size of your adjustments, I know you haven't done the latter.

I'm not 100% sure I'm reading you correctly, but I don't think you're correct.

MFP calculates an expected deficit based on your activity level+bmr and calorie goal (or sets the calorie goal based deficit; either way). When MFP adjusts for the Fitbit data, it adjusts your calorie goal to maintain the same calorie deficit.

It doesn't really matter what your MFP calorie goal/activity level settings are. What matters is the calorie deficit MFP is set to.

Go to Home -> Goals and look at the Deficit section. Adjust your MFP data to have the deficit you want, let your Fitbit sync in, and MFP will adjust on the fly according to Fitbit data to maintain that calorie deficit.