The lesson I see here is that if you switch devices and see a big change in estimated calories burned (when I switched from the One to the Charge HR, my calories stayed about the same), then don't assume the new device is correct. Especially if your weight was stable using the previous device. If you're on maintenance, then a cautious approach to changing calories eaten (keeping an eye on the scale), maybe a double check of various settings, is the way to go.

I found it best to set my calorie limit and stick to that rather than letting Fitbit give you more calories because you have been active

lexipants85 wrote: »

I am thinking my calorie allowance is huge, I've only had the charge a few days and I never eat as much as it says.
How can I change my setting to sedentary lifestyle? I can't seem to find it anywhere!

In MFP go to Settings->Update diet/fitness profile. If you change that to Sedentary from something higher, the adjustments from Fitbit will actually look higher, because MFP will expect you to be burning fewer calories, but Fitbit will still report the same calorie burn estimate.

The real question is whether the calorie adjustment you're getting is reasonable. That depends on how active you actually are (a rough gauge of that would be how many steps your Fitbit says you take), your age & current weight, how much weight you have to lose and at what rate you want to lose it.

For instance, yesterday I took just over 17K steps and Fitbit says my calorie burn for the day was 2635. MFP thinks that without exercise, I'd burn 1767 calories. So, 2635-1767=868 Fitbit calorie adjustment. Add that to my starting calories of 1530 (MFP set that a while ago, when I weighed more, based on a weight loss goal of 1/2 pound a week) gives me 2398 calories to eat. I know from experience that this is a reasonable adjustment for me. Since I actually have a good bit more that 25 pounds to lose, it's okay for me to have up to 500 calories left at the end of the day, but if I have more than that, I have a bedtime snack because I don't want to lose more than 1.5 pounds per week.

lexipants85 wrote: »

I am thinking my calorie allowance is huge, I've only had the charge a few days and I never eat as much as it says.
How can I change my setting to sedentary lifestyle? I can't seem to find it anywhere!

Since that calorie allowance is totally based on what you have burned daily, that is what you are truly doubting ultimately then.

What experience or knowledge do you have about what you may actually burn daily to base that doubt on?

Or rather, is the doubt totally based on your experience of eating much lower calorie levels, but not actually anything about burning levels?

If you haven't already, I recommend that you read the FAQ in the stickies for the group. Lots of good advice there.

I think your approach would work, but could make planning tricky, since you don't know how many calories you're going to burn each day (over and above your BMR) until late in the day. It kind of depends on what kind of exercise you do. If you do things that your Fitbit can't estimate well then you want to log those exercises manually. If you tend to be fairly consistent in your level of activity, then once you've had your tracker for a while then you can look at your average burn over the last 30 days and aim for that value minus 500. (I picked 30 days because Fitbit conveniently gives you that number if you look at your profile page.)

In reality, I follow a modified version of your approach. I keep MFP set to Sedentary, let my Fitbit take care of estimating calories burned, and use the Calories Remaining value that MFP gives me as my calorie limit. Since that is adjusted by what Fitbit says I've burned, I have a good idea of how much I can eat. I do try to leave some calories "on the table" because the calories remaining value will go down a little between when I go to bed and midnight (because after I go to bed, I'm only burning calories at my BMR, but MFP assumes that my "sedentary" rate of burn is constant over the 24 hours of the day).

My own realization with the charge HR was not to log my exercise. I just put a post on my page for what I have done and let the fitbit adjust my cals. I was maintaining and then gaining! I figured out why! It was doubling my burnt cals between the fitbit and mfp. I am now losing again! Love my fibit!

Resurrecting an aging thread here, but...

I've recently upgraded from a Flex to a Charge HR, and I noticed that my calories burned on any given day have increased by around 500-1,500 calories.

With the Flex, a 10,000-step day got me about 2,500 calories burned pretty consistently.

With the Charge HR, a 10k-step day gets me anywhere from 3,000 - 3,500 calories burned and even a 7k step day will put me up around 3,000 calories burned.

None of my settings (stride, activity level, etc.) have changed, so I suspect it's the HRM measurements bing factored into the calorie burn, and I further suspect that the discrepancy may be (in part) due to the wide variation between my fairly-low resting heartrate (~50 BPM) and walking/moving heartrate (which the HR measures as spiking to 100-120).

For example, my HRM chart shows me spending 3h 3m in the "fat burn" zone (89-123 BPM), with 8m in "cardio" (125-150) despite not doing much more than pacing during conference calls and walking through a few parking lots.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's much of anything I can do about it, but something's definitely "off" on the Charge HR calorie estimations & I'd love to hear any suggestions folks might have to set things straight.

Perhaps a custom heart rate zone on the Fitbit would help. You can only have one, rather than the three you get with the default setting, but it might alleviate the problem.