Fitbit Charge HR..... do I buy or do I not buy?

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  • _rachel_k
    _rachel_k Posts: 243 Member
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    RebeccaD22 thank you!
  • sodakat
    sodakat Posts: 1,126 Member
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    I have a Fitbit Flex which I believe is very accurate, but you can determine your own TDEE without buying anything or relying on an online calculator. However, you must log everything you eat and you must log accurately.

    [Total calories consumed+(Total lbs lost x 3500)]/# of days =TDEE

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  • rosebette
    rosebette Posts: 1,659 Member
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    I have a fitbit Charge HR, and I believe it is quite accurate. My hope was that it would "give" me more calories than MFP because it was calculating my heartrate during all activities, such as yoga or strength training, but no such luck. Today I did kickboxing, yoga, and a 15 minutes walk -- my burn so far is around 1400 calories. I'm over 50 and short, so I have a pretty low metabolism, sometimes under 1100 when not active all day.
  • _rachel_k
    _rachel_k Posts: 243 Member
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    rosebette, that's what I'm talking about! Online calculators don't take everything into consideration. I had a 30 minute walk at lunch today and Map My Walk said I burned 222 calories...... did I really though? How much did it over/under estimate? I don't know. Do I eat back 100 or 50? I went under a bridge twice so is the distance accurate to the calories burned?
  • rosebette
    rosebette Posts: 1,659 Member
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    _rachel_k wrote: »
    rosebette, that's what I'm talking about! Online calculators don't take everything into consideration. I had a 30 minute walk at lunch today and Map My Walk said I burned 222 calories...... did I really though? How much did it over/under estimate? I don't know. Do I eat back 100 or 50? I went under a bridge twice so is the distance accurate to the calories burned?

    I found the estimate for a basic walk for someone of my size very close to the MFP estimate. The big differences I found were in what I considered "high impact" exercises, like kickboxing and zumba, and lower impact activities like strength training and yoga. My burn for "high impact" activities was much lower than I thought -- MFP was off by almost double what the rate actually was. Also, my heart rate drops so much during some parts of yoga that it really negates any calorie burning aspect of that activity as exercise. However, I work on a big campus and did find that stair climbing boosted my burn a bit more than if those steps were just for a walk.
  • MeanderingMammal
    MeanderingMammal Posts: 7,866 Member
    edited June 2015
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    rosebette wrote: »
    ... because it was calculating my heartrate during all activities, such as yoga or strength training, but no such luck.

    And this is part of the fallacy that the marketing around devices like these perpetuates. HR is not a meaningful indicator of calorie expenditure for many activities. For yoga your HR is too low to demonstrate anything over BMR, for something like kickboxing the fluctuations in heart rate will lead to an overestimation, for strength training the cause of the changes in HR is not the demand for oxygen, but merely the requirement to increase blood pressure to sustain the movement.


  • editorgrrl
    editorgrrl Posts: 7,060 Member
    edited June 2015
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    rosebette wrote: »
    The big differences I found were in what I considered "high impact" exercises, like kickboxing and zumba, and lower impact activities like strength training and yoga. My burn for "high impact" activities was much lower than I thought -- MFP was off by almost double.

    ^This. It's human nature to overestimate your exertion level. So any device will probably give you a more accurate burn than logging your exercise in MFP.

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