Fitbit help

Well, you don't want to reset it to 0, I mean you haven't burnt 0 calories today! Have you definitely put all your stats in right? What time is it where you are?

The reason it says that is because your body still needs calories just to exist, even if you're asleep or in a coma. This amount is called your Basal Metabolic Rate or BMR and that is what your Fitbit is estimating. It's saying that from midnight until right now your body has used about 500 calories keeping yourself alive, pumping blood, breathing, etc, even if you were asleep.

Your Fitbit will allot you more calories burned if you're active, of course, but it also includes these base ones to give you a estimation for the entire day.

Edited to add: Every single morning I wake up with 300-odd calories burned showing on my Fitbit. By the end of the day it's usually around 2000. That doesn't mean I've done 2000 calories worth of exercise, that just means that, between the calories my body needs to stay alive AND the ones I've burned from walking, moving, doing stuff, I've burned about 2000.

If I lay in bed all day, it's still around 1200, because my body still needs some fuel to maintain its functions.

islarose05 wrote: »

Yes I've put all the stats in it asked me to. So then every time I go for a big walk and want to know how many calories I burnt I have to make a note of what's already on there and then deduct it when I finish excercise? It just seems daft I bought this thing to see how many calories I burned while excercisibg so I can update my fitness pal journal accurately, not what's going on while I'm asleep lol!!

That's not how a Fitbit is intended to be used. You're supposed to wear it all day and allow it to calculate for you, not use it just to track extra exercise calories.

Link it to your MFP account as the above poster suggested and it will do the work for you.

The number fitbit gives you automatically is your entire daily burn - including all the sleeping bit. You can use it to track exercise as well. If you do that then it will give you a record for your walks, and you'll be able to see how many steps you took, calories burned etc during the time you were walking.

The fitbit group on here as loads of information on how fitbit works and how it works with MFP. But the short reply is just leave the two synced - then there is no need to update your exercise in MFP (you will need to add non-step based activity to fitbit) because it'll be done for you.

islarose05 wrote: »

Thankyou really appreciate advice! So I've linked the Fitbit to this account I think, and read this article but wanted to ask, so where as yesterday I would manually add excercise for eg, 1 hours brisk walk abd I would guess calories at 200 burned and input into mfp, so I don't need to do this now? How will the Fitbit know how long I've been walking for if there's no start/end time ? I'm sorry if I'm being a bit thick this is all totally over my head!!

No you don't need to add it, it'll add the calories automatically.

When you signed up to MFP you gave it an activity level - sedentary, lightly active, moderately active, etc. Each one of these has a rough step count associated with it, and when you go over that many steps Fitbit will automatically start adding on the extra calories.

You can change your activity level on the MFP goals page.

This should get you to the Fitbit group http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/group/1290-fitbit-users

I have a Fitbit Zip that I only want to use to count my steps. That's it! Yet even though I log in x number of steps, when it syncs to my computer it reduces the amount of steps. I called their customer service and they weren't very helpful. I'll try again and see if I get someone knowledgeable.