Newbie Question :)

When you sync a fitbit with MFP, it communicates to MFP when it believes you are being more active than what you set up your MFP account sax for example, I am "lightly active" in my MFP set-up and so MFP has given me enough calories to reflect that activity level. When I am more active than "lightly active" fitbit informs MFP and MFP gives me more calories based on my predicted activity level for the day. If I am very active in the morning and then slack off, some of these calories might get taken away, so you have to be careful.

Your "bonus" calories from fitbit are logged as a positive under "exercise." They are added to your calorie balance like a deposit to a bank account. Food is deductions. Overall, you want your net calories (the balance of your account) to be at or under your MFP target.

Negative calorie adjustments means that if you are LESS active than your account setup with MFP, you get calories taken away from your account. This means that if I set up my account for "lightly active" and then am sedentary all day, I will get calories taken away.

So the +460 is what the fitbit believes that MFP should add? I'm so confused...damnit just when I feel like I have it figured out..
Currently my log is:

Goal 1790
Food 1496
Exercise +460 <--this is the first time I've seen it positive
Net 1956

Remaining -166

But I suppose as long as I stay as close to my daily goal the +/- under exercise won't matter as much?

Ahhh. I see. It's the opposite of what I said earlier. Sorry. (I don't actually have negative calorie adjustments enabled, so I haven't given much thought to how it's laid out in the program.)

Let's try again.

Your goal is to eat 1790 calories a day. You've eaten 1496, so that would normally put you under your calorie goal. However, because you've allowed negative adjustments (which means you're allowing MFP to take away your calories if you aren't being active enough), your Fitbit has told MFP that your activity level today has been low enough (below your normal activity level) that you should eat 460 FEWER calories than normal. SO MFP treats it as though you ate 460 calories of food because you were "460 calories-worth" less active than you said you were when you set up your account.

Based on the activity that you've done today, in order to meet your goal of 1790 NET calories (food calories -- exercise calories = net calories), you will need to eat 460 fewer calories (or do more exercise!). So in your case today, it was (food calories + calories-not-burned-because-you-were-more-sedentary-than-expected = net calories). So you went over your goal for your net calories by 166 calories, leaving you with -166 remaining.

Another way to think of this is that instead of getting a bonus of calories as your reward for being active, you got a fine of calories as your punishment for being inactive. (This is exactly why I don't have negative adjustments enabled on mine . . . you can see that I am motivated much more by rewards than punishments!)

If you don't allow negative adjustments, then your exercise will remain at 0 until the Fitbit communicates to MFP that you are being more active than you said you would. The only day that I didn't get "bonus" calories was when I was sick at home. If I had had negative calorie adjustments enabled, I'm sure I would have seen a punishment "fine" and I just don't need that kind of negativity when I'm already sick in bed.

The other way to avoid the negative adjustments is you make sure that your account is set up with a "sedentary" activity level. That way, you'll be more likely to surpass your activity level and be rewarded and less likely to undershoot it and be fined.

basically what the prior response said, but the +460 is due to the allowing of the negative adjustment yes, however whether or not you can eat at about the daily goal, depends on whether you chose the appropriate activity level I'd guess, as the fitbit is saying that based on your "step" based activity you failed to achieve the level of activity you chose, now if you did other non-step based activity you would log that and the time you did it to over ride the fitbit assessment of that time period. I also have the one, and I just went ahead as nedra suggested and use sedentary as my activity setting and allow the fitbit to *kitten* my activity and report to mfp what I have been up and then my calorie total for goal goes up. Let's me see how active I have been and the number will then be a negative under exercise instead of that positive, I don't have negative turned on myself currently, but fitbit is always giving me credit for the step based stuff I do so it's always allowing me more in my goal. kinda rambly but guess I'm in for setting to sedentary and allowing fitbit to tell mfp what my levels can be according to the step based activity I engage in, I also log non step based stuff, good luck