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TDEE calculators vs fitbit

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Lowfatlady
Lowfatlady Posts: 8 Member
in Social Groups
All the tdee calculators I have used give me a tdee around 2154. I am 5'2, female, 152 lbs. My fitbit says on days I work out (3x a week for an hour) this is correct. However, on other days my fitbit says I burn about 1700 calories. I am close to my goal by about 8-10 pounds. How would you handle this? Would you eat at a deficit or closer to your tdee? I tend to eat around 1650-1700 calories. Is this too little?

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  • Wantingtolose1
    Wantingtolose1 Posts: 139 Member
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    I would take an estimate of what you burn with your fitbit and use that as your tdee. Fitbit normally works this out if you look at your estimated predicted burn for the day as that's the average of your previous days
  • heybales
    heybales Posts: 18,842 Member
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    Do you manually add workouts that are NOT step-based, otherwise your Fitbit daily burn is underestimated.

    And yes the TDEE calc isn't going to match - you are guessing from 5 rough levels.
    The Fitbit is giving daily infinite level estimates - more accurate when you correct it when you need to.

    Actually, it underestimates in all cases. All non-moving time is given BMR level burn. But in reality you burn more awake, more sitting, move standing, more eating and digesting food (about 10% of what you eat is processing it).

    Level walking and slower runner can be decent estimates, add incline and more intense, or non-step based, really underestimated then.

    250 cal deficit is about right for that little.
  • sbarella
    sbarella Posts: 713 Member
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    In my experience, FitBit has been quite close to TDEE calculators so far and my results are quite consistent with Fitbit's estimates.
    When I exercise (weight lifting 3x week, a few bike rides and 10k steps a day) Fitbit is deadly accurate for me. If it says I had a weekly 3500 cals deficit I lose a pound on that week 90% of the time.
    OTOH I've had some weeks where I didn't exercise at all and I was very sedentary (less than 5k steps a day, sometimes even less than 2k!) because of a crazy schedule and Fitbit wasn't that accurate (I lost way less weight than predicted), which probably means my BMR is a bit lower than the estimate, who knows. Everyone's different :)

    If I were you, I'd try following Fitbit's calorie goal for a couple of weeks and see what happens.
    If you only need to lose 8-10 pounds you can pick a low daily deficit. Subtracting calories from you TDEE on sedentary days can leave you with a very low recommended intake, so I usually don't eat back all my Fitbit adjustments on workout days and I bank them for my rest day (which is usually Sunday, and having a low calorie goal on Sunday sucks).

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