Gained weight using Charge HR
denorios
Posts: 38 Member
I've been a long-time FitBit user and I was very keen to get the new Charge HR with the heart rate monitor feature. I bought it as soon as it was released, and was quite surprised when I started using it to find the calorie adjustment was so much higher than I'd been getting using my FitBit One. But I figured with the heart rate feature the Charge HR was likely to be much more accurate, and I am very active, so perhaps I really was burning more calories than I thought I was. So I readjusted my settings in light of this and enjoyed the extra calories I was earning!
Three months on, and I weighed myself for the first time since getting the Charge HR - only to find to my horror I'd gained six pounds! Clearly the Charge HR really was greatly overestimating my calorie burn, as I'd been afraid of at first. I switched back to the One this past week, ate at the calorie level it was recommending, and bam, one pound lost in a week, as expected.
So just a word of warning to anyone worried about the Charge HR overestimating their calorie burn and their calorie adjustment being surprisingly high - it may well be doing just that!
Three months on, and I weighed myself for the first time since getting the Charge HR - only to find to my horror I'd gained six pounds! Clearly the Charge HR really was greatly overestimating my calorie burn, as I'd been afraid of at first. I switched back to the One this past week, ate at the calorie level it was recommending, and bam, one pound lost in a week, as expected.
So just a word of warning to anyone worried about the Charge HR overestimating their calorie burn and their calorie adjustment being surprisingly high - it may well be doing just that!
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Do you have it set at the right activity level for you ?0
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I have it set at sedentary so I don't overestimate my activity level and can judge it based on my daily calorie adjustment, rather than pre-guessing my activity level for the day. But even on days I would consider relatively light exercise-wise I was getting 300-400 extra calories, and on my active days I was getting over a 1000 extra calories, just from lots of walking and maybe 30-45 minutes of running!0
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I only go by Calories on MFP and not FitBit as they end up different to begin with0
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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.0
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I have it set at sedentary so I don't overestimate my activity level and can judge it based on my daily calorie adjustment, rather than pre-guessing my activity level for the day. But even on days I would consider relatively light exercise-wise I was getting 300-400 extra calories, and on my active days I was getting over a 1000 extra calories, just from lots of walking and maybe 30-45 minutes of running!
Did you use it on your dominant hand? I have seen others complain about this and it corrected itself by switching to non dominant hand. Also is your MFP account set to negative calories? It all seems to be more accurate with those two settings.
I got my Charge HR end of Jan and have been dropping @1 lb a week with those settings. I had not been using fitbits before that, just a Polar HR. Love having my HR with me all the time and no chest band involved.
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retirehappy wrote: »Did you use it on your dominant hand? I have seen others complain about this and it corrected itself by switching to non dominant hand. Also is your MFP account set to negative calories? It all seems to be more accurate with those two settings.
Yep to both of those. I wore it on my left wrist so I started off with the FitBit set on non-dominant, but then I switched the setting to dominant to see if that would reduce the sensitivity, but it didn't seem to make any difference. And I always have my settings on negative too.
As an example, one day using the Charge HR I logged 27,667 steps and burned 3,117 calories - another day using the One I logged 26,641 steps and burned 2,630 calories. That's a difference of nearly 500 calories just from 1000 steps difference, and both were just days with walking, no running or cardio.
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What were the distances along with those steps?
Because the calorie burn is ultimately based on the distance, steps and stride length just help calculate distance.
Because you can have equal number of easy shuffle steps or serious striding steps, and different distance and of course calorie burn.
Now the HRM version if HR gets high enough is based on that, but some of the daily steps is still by distance.0 -
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 active0
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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!0 -
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.0 -
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!
Assuming you mean you can't find it on fitbit.com :
Log >Food Plan>use the gear icon on the right handside of that box, to set to Personalized or Sedentary.0 -
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?0 -
I just got the Charge HR last week. This is my first Fitbit or HR monitor so I have no experience syncing Fitbit and MFP.
Someone with more experience, please tell me if this method will work: Look at the total calories burned on Fitbit and subtract 500 (too lose 1 pound a week). Then use MFP to track my caloric intake.
This method eliminates tracking exercise, eating back exercise calories, worrying about if adjustments are accurate, setting an accurate activity level...
As of right now, I have burned 1,864 calories today. I shouldn't eat more than 1364 calories today.
I haven't had enough time to test my theory. Your thoughts are greatly appreciated.0 -
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).0 -
That would work, though it could make planning a bit difficult until you know about where you are going to land each day, then adjust as needed.
Problem is you keep burning calories when you go to bed. Stay up till midnight, no issue. Go to bed at 9 pm, then you'll miss your goal constantly each day by decent amount, and if that 500 deficit was reasonable, that would make it unreasonable.0 -
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!0
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Thanks for the help/suggestions heybales and NancyN795. I guess since I go to bed close to 11:00 and I pretty much do step-type workouts I haven't run into any issues. But those are good things to keep in mind.
I also read the stickies. Good information there.0 -
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. 0 -
So that does sound like inflated HR for reasons other than your actual level of effort.
And indeed, that is a shortcoming of using any HRM to estimate calorie burn.
It has no idea of your higher HR is due to stress, asthma, dehydrated, heat, medicine, drugs, caffeine, medical condition, ect.
Fitbit at least seems to try to factor in doing enough steps before it decides to use that formula and per second logging - but you pacing has fooled it.
You are correct, nothing to do about it except don't use it as HRM and have it start doing calorie burn on inflated HR.
Dare say, even during exercise that is intense, it's likely inflated to some degree, probably less and less as it goes higher and higher, but you'd never know without some decent testing and analysis when that happens and to what degree.
Step based and manual logging of other stuff may be better.
Put the HRM on when curious what the HR is during non-exercise time.
Don't worry, there are many that bought Polar HRM's with full knowledge they had inflated HR dues to medical conditions, and didn't realize that would foul up calorie burn estimates. Or didn't realize it until they had the HRM.0 -
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.0
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Even though the charge HR seems to overinflate calories burned, it's still nice to have some way of accounting for intensity. What I do this just adjust my target calorie deficit in my fitness pal to more than I want in real life. That way I still have something that accounts for intensity, and I'm still meeting my calorie goals.0
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Yeah, I've lowered my calorie target as well, and I'll probably lower it further. If they allowed custom zones instead of one zone, I might be able to go that route... I may try a single custom zone and see how it affects calorie burn estimates (I suspect it won't, and Fitbit will still use the default zones for estimating calorie burn).0
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The zones aren't going to be used to calculate calories. HR is. The zone is merely an estimate of what level that HR happens to be at for exercising different ways, based on big assumption of HRmax.
You aren't going to get around the fact that for estimating calorie burns - HR isn't going to work for you at all.
You can indeed still use it for what HRM's were originally designed for - monitoring your heart rate and allowing you to train better for something that required it.0 -
I get what you're saying but my point was that, if they allowed customization of the HR zones *and* adjusted the calorie burn estimates to correlate to the zones rather than to pure BPM, then it might make a difference.
My aforementioned suspicion (above) was an acknowledgement that they probably don't calibrate calorie burn estimates based on zone thresholds although, frankly, they should... Those zones are based on percentage of maximum, and calorie burn is also at least loosely tied to percentage of maximum in as much as there's a correlation to VO2 max.
In any case, I've actually gotten around it, for now at least, by lowering my daily calorie target to 800-1000 calories. I'll need to see how things go for a few weeks to see where that settles.0 -
Well, they actually do base the calculations on the % of HRmax and relationship to VO2max, without the need for zones to have anything to do with it.
So the same formula for calorie burn based on HR is happening no matter where you put those HR zones - that is purely for personal training purposes.
Because as they would rightly expect - hardly anyone is going to have a clue what zone truly relates to aerobic or fat burning or anaerobic for themselves, as vast majority using the device would never pay for a VO2max test and then personalize these zones to correctly match the findings.
I would love to see someone test a set time and HR walk at decent HR when first getting the unit, and then after the first nights sleep where resting HR is seen, and then a week later after some exercise time is done.
Because better calculation of VO2max involves HRmax and resting HR actually, it's a public study that even Polar uses. But there is also a self-selected activity level for exercise.
But Fitbit could gather that from weekly exercise records, and keep making adjustments.
Because I doubt they are going to share their proprietary formula, even if it is based on public research.0 -
I'm one of the minority in that regard, I readily admit.
Even in my case, the data that I have is dated, so who knows whether it's all that valuable or accurate now.
In any case, really, what I'd like is for them to let me customize resting/max HR. Many of the apps & services out there let you do that and allow customization of the zones -- check out https://my.digifit.com/site/heartzones for example -- but just setting Max and going with the default percentages would be better than what Fitbit provides now.
I've also been playing around with Azumio Instant Heartrate today to do some measurement comparisons. While the Charge HR seems to measure my resting / at east HR within a few BPM of Azumio, my "casual walking" HR is pretty consistently 10-20 BPM higher with the Charge as compared to Azumio. I'll run some comparisons with my chest strap HRM this weekend.
ETA: I've also seen some folks report that the Charge HR calorie burn estimates seem to settle in after a week or few of using it... It'll be interesting to see if mine changes, although I'm a couple of weeks in now already.
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I agree - for all the claims of this is the unit if you want to be semi-serious about workouts, that inability to change HRmax to a better value is odd.
And display recent average of resting HR would be good.
And not giving the ability to adjust all your zones, that's just crazy.
VO2max can change easily every 6 months, unless you were at upper reaches of fitness level and have maintained it. While easy to lose it of course, it's much harder to improve it when already high, so it tends to stay about level.
Of course if you lost weight, it automatically went up even if fitness level didn't change.
Your is first comment about HR being higher with Charge, though I'd trust a specifically designed light for HR more than using smartphone camera. HRM with strap should be interesting test of both.
I think most with the unit have no HRM to compare too, and 6 second count when you stop is pretty fraught with inaccuracy and potential for Fitbit to get accurate at that point.
I'll have to start paying more attention to the Charge HR and Surge topics for folks getting or just ordered it - see if anyone is up to an experiment.
That's how I found out I wasn't alone with the BodyMedia sensors not being accurate with not only me, but about 50% of those that responded to the topic asking for details.0 -
I wondered the same thing about the various smart-phone HRM apps' accuracy, but from all of my own testing & from what I've seen in various reviews, it seems to be pretty solid.
I've run a few serial tests with the Azumio and there's relatively little difference between the reads. It's also got a "stand up" test that takes a longer than 6 second read, and that seems to match up with the 6-second tests. Although I haven't checked recently, it's also been pretty accurate relative to my chest-strap HRM, and even "manual" pulse checks have always dovetailed with Azumio's readings.
And no... I wasn't at what I'd call "the upper reaches of fitness" ... even after losing a good bit of weight. ;-)0 -
Haven't had a chance to compare the chest-strap HRM yet, but I've found that tightening the band on the Charge HR seems to have brought the BPM measurements of the Charge HR back in line with Azumio.
I'll keep an eye on it this week, but it looks like wearing the band too loosely may result in artificially high readings. My "casual walking" and even "light yardwork" readings yesterday & today were capping out 20 BPM below what I was getting with "casual walking" while wearing the band a notch or two more loosely.0 -
princessofredrock wrote: »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!
Hi I have had my fitbit for a few weeks. I was to see how many calories I'm burnig during workouts. Is it okay to press the timer to capture those workout sessions? I wont enter exercise on mfp. Just not sure it the calries will be messed up leaving me more calories left over to eat than I need.0
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