fitbit seems wonky

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edj60
edj60 Posts: 1 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
I walked 10,000+ steps yesterday but MFP only credited me with burning only 95 calories. I was hoping to burn between 500 -1000 calories but I don't have time to walk 1000,000 steps. Anyone else have this problem? How did you solve it? Thanks! (First post).

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  • TavistockToad
    TavistockToad Posts: 35,719 Member
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    What's your activity setting?
  • zoelizjef95
    zoelizjef95 Posts: 12 Member
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    I have this same issue
    Activity setting in MFP or Fitbit? Does this affect it?
  • Mathsrunner
    Mathsrunner Posts: 93 Member
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    I'm pretty sure it is the same for all activity trackers and it is actually MFPs calculation that is confusing. I think, for sedentary activity level, MFP calculates your BMR and adds somewhere around 20% to it to compensate for light daily activity, so if your BMR is 2000 calories, MFP will set your, for sedentary, calories burned a day to 2400 calories. This means a lot of your first 10000 steps will go to fulfilling this goal of the extra 400 calories and you will only start seeing decent losses after this point.

    For instance, if I do 8000 steps I'll see no calorie adjustment from MFP, but at 16000 I'll see 300-350 calories extra burned as I've already covered the ones added by MFP in the background. So those calories have been credited to you for your activity, but are being used to cover how MFP works out how many calories you can consume in a day.
  • shadow2soul
    shadow2soul Posts: 7,692 Member
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    zoerainbows wrote: »
    I have this same issue
    Activity setting in MFP or Fitbit? Does this affect it?
    On MFP

    It seems that (from what I see posted here on MFP) at around 3k steps is when people start to notice a positive adjustment with their activity level set to Sedentary. Higher activity levels mean MFP thinks your base calorie burn is higher, so it takes longer to get extra calories from Fitbit.

    Sedentary = BMR x 1.2
    Lightly Active = BMR x 1.4
    Active = BMR x 1.6
    Very Active = BMR x 1.8

    You get calories added from Fitbit when your Fitbit calorie burn is higher than what MFP estimated based on your activity level. It is done this way so that you won't get extra calories for doing stuff that your activity level has
  • amusedmonkey
    amusedmonkey Posts: 10,330 Member
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    If you have your activity level set to something else, then the majority of your burns have already been accounted for in settings so you don't get a lot extra on top because that would be double counting.

    If you have your activity level set to sedentary and always get 500 or more calories for 10k steps wait it out for a few days. Sometimes there is a communication issue between MFP and Fitbit. To get around it temporarily you might need to calculate your extra allowance manually by subtracting your MFP maintenance calories from the total calories burned on Fitbit. It does usually fix itself in a couple of days.
  • zoelizjef95
    zoelizjef95 Posts: 12 Member
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    Thank you! I'll need to sit and work it all out a bit better then and try to make sense of it

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