Fitbit calories are a joke

quiksylver296 wrote: »

Um, if you eat all your Fitbit calories, you are eating at maintenance and will not lose. Because Fitbit is showing you how many calories you burned that day. So if you eat the same number of calories you burn, you are in maintenance. Eat fewer calories than Fitbit is showing to lose weight.

My Fitbit gives me ~2200 calories per day. I eat ~1900 calories per day. If I ate ~2200 calories per day, I would maintain my weight, not lose.

The fitbit shows *BOTH* the (estimated) number of calories you burned for the day, and the number of calories you can eat for the day. Most days I burn around 2200-2400 calories but it never tells me I have that many calories to eat (usually it's about 1400-1900 to eat). So yes, you should be able to eat what fitbit "allows" you for the day, which will be a different number than what it shows you burned for the day (provided also that you have set up fitbit to guide you to a calorie deficit).

Jthanmyfitnesspal wrote: »

Case in point. Regular day of walking around at work gives me 11k steps, 580kcals, according to mfp based on fitbit link. I also did a killer 40 min circuit training workout, for which mfp gave me another 450 kcals or so based on manual entry in mfp app. I think both estimates are too high.

So that's the issue. You don't log any exercise in MFP because it gets double counted. All exercises need to be logged in Fitbit and all food in MFP. I weigh nearly 240 and I never get an adjustment larger than 450 calories for 11k steps unless I have a pretty hard incline workout or a run. Average walking cadence is 100-110 steps per minute, so if you consolidate 11k steps in one session you are talking about 100 or more minutes of walking. At my weight, I do believe 4.5 calories per minute (270/hour) is a believable burn for walking.

I have eaten back every single calorie of the adjustment and it has been spot on for my weight loss down to the 0.1 of a kilo. Keep in mind I have been calculating my own adjustment since the communication between Fitbit and MFP went bonkers a while ago registering either very low or very high burns. How I calculate it? I know my maintenance calories on MFP are 2260. In the morning of every day I go to Fitbit, look at my burn for the previous day (calories burned) then subtract my maintenance, then eat back yesterday's extra calories today.

Example:
Here is yesterday..


My total calories burned was 2686
2686 - 2260 = 426 calories is my yesterdays eat-back adjustment, and I'm going to eat back all or most of these calories today.

To get your MFP maintenance calories you go to Goals>View Guided Setup, make sure you are set to sedentary and pick "Maintain my current weight" for a goal then "Update Profile". Here is how my success screen looks.



Follow the same steps or edit manually to set it back to your desired weight loss plan and don't forget to recalculate maintenance every time you lose 5 or so pounds.

It takes a bit more work, and I don't get to eat my day's adjustment immediately on the same day, but I don't trust the communication between MFP and Fitbit anymore, and I'm not bothered by the 10 seconds it takes to calculate my adjustment manually.

One more thing that might go wrong is that your adjustment can be blown out during the day, especially if you have predictive adjustment turned on in Fitbit. Fitbit would assume you are going to be just as active for the rest of the day and give you blown out adjustments that level out and decrease by midnight. Another reason why previous day's adjustment would be more accurate. You can remedy that to some extent by going to "Food Plan" in Fitbit and picking "Sedentary" instead of "Personalized"

Jthanmyfitnesspal wrote: »

Finally, I submit the fact that I am tracking steps both with the fitbit and with Samsung "S Health" included with my phone. In every case, the Fitbit estimates far more steps than S Health, typically by around 20%. You can chalk that up to the fact that the Fitbit records a step for certain arm motions in addition to steps. (It counts a few steps even when I'm driving to work.)

Well I have the opposite issue with S Health, when it's in my pocket counting steps it records about 1.5x as many as the Charge HR (6000 opposed to a far more realistic 4000 for a schoolrun yesterday). Plus remember that the Fitbit is recording steps 24/7 while the phone is only recording when it's being carried.

I never lose weight when I eat back exercise calories either, so I stopped doing it and just used the TDEE method. I still use my fitbit for general activity level tracking, but I ignore its calorie adjustments.

MFP isn't any better, by the way. Every time I entered a spin class you'd think it was the Apocalypse. I got so sick of the shrieking red text telling me I had to eat a wildebeest or die that I just tactfully stopped discussing my exercise habit with the tracker.

Jthanmyfitnesspal wrote: »

I hear a lot of disagreement with my premise. I'm surprised. I though a lot of people would agree with me! Although, you can question my intake monitoring, I'm pretty good at that. BTW, I have a Fitbit Charge HR and the accounts are linked for calories and steps.

The problem is that I do a number of workouts that the Fitbit does not track well, including swimming and circuit training. For my leg workouts, I use the the Precor Adaptive Motion Trainer (AMT) and Elliptical trainer at the gym. The Fitbit agrees somewhat with the elliptical, but significantly underestimates the AMT. In all cases, including swimming, I like wearing the fitbit because it tracks my heart rate, which is useful to see later. (I know that Fitbit does not recommend taking it swimming, but it seems to work OK.

The solution (according to what understand from the MFP site) is to enter workouts into your MFP diary using calorie estimates (if available), letting MFP do the estimate otherwise. It is supposed to help if the workout timing is accurate. MFP is then supposed to do the accounting, subtracting the calories from the Fitbit tally. I think this process is imperfect and the total is often too high in my case.

I do not like entering exercise on the fitbit app. I had too many frustrations and gave up.

Finally, I submit the fact that I am tracking steps both with the fitbit and with Samsung "S Health" included with my phone. In every case, the Fitbit estimates far more steps than S Health, typically by around 20%. You can chalk that up to the fact that the Fitbit records a step for certain arm motions in addition to steps. (It counts a few steps even when I'm driving to work.)

Try logging exercise only into fitbit and food only into MFP. The fitbit tracker is substantially more accurate than any step counter that is on your phone. I wouldn't be overly concerned about a few extra steps here and there for a number of reasons:

1. Chances are at some point the fitbit misses a few steps
2. When you are snot moving around fitbit assigns your calorie burn as your BMR, it isn't, you are burning more than your BMR when you are sitting up at a desk and when you are standing upright but not walking.

If it really bothers you then unlink the two and sell your fitbit, but as you can see from the response the vast majority of the people find them to be reasonably accurate.