Eating all Fitbit calories

I don't eat back any of my exercise calories. I eat up to my hunger level and try to stick to nutritious foods. I'm on quite a low calorie level, but often find I'm 50 under or 50 over. I'm only interested in the weekly average.
On days when I'm particularly active I might eat a bit more, on sedentary days I might eat a little less.
If you really feel you tend to sedentary outside gym time, then try walking and non-gym exercises. These are easier to keep up than the gym (and considerably more enjoyable).
The aim should be to increase your metabolism as your diet progresses.
Good luck.

Just to be clear, by Fitbit cals do you mean what the Fitbit dashboard says you have left, or MFP's exercise cals as decided by your Fitbit? For me the answer is no to following the dashboard, yes to eating back all of my MFP exercise cals. I only ate half of them for a long time, and I lost a lot of muscle mass.

So fuel your body appropriately. Eat those cals back!

If spreadsheets aren't your thing, you can get a rough picture of your data the way I do with Fitbit, MFP Android, and trendweight.com. You can see screencaps from them in my post here.

CoachJen71 wrote: »

Just to be clear, by Fitbit cals do you mean what the Fitbit dashboard says you have left, or MFP's exercise cals as decided by your Fitbit? For me the answer is no to following the dashboard, yes to eating back all of my MFP exercise cals. I only ate half of them for a long time, and I lost a lot of muscle mass.

So fuel your body appropriately. Eat those cals back!

If spreadsheets aren't your thing, you can get a rough picture of your data the way I do with Fitbit, MFP Android, and trendweight.com. You can see screencaps from them in my post here.

The spreadsheet uses Trendweight and Fitbit if these are your tools. Its purpose is to give one confidence as to the accuracy of their Cal In/Cal Out logging.

For example my friend whose data are in the example knows that her tracking under-estimates her burns by more than 3%.

Thus she no longer has an excuse for being in the green all the time given she wants to maintain ;-)

PAV8888 wrote: »

CoachJen71 wrote: »

Just to be clear, by Fitbit cals do you mean what the Fitbit dashboard says you have left, or MFP's exercise cals as decided by your Fitbit? For me the answer is no to following the dashboard, yes to eating back all of my MFP exercise cals. I only ate half of them for a long time, and I lost a lot of muscle mass.

So fuel your body appropriately. Eat those cals back!

If spreadsheets aren't your thing, you can get a rough picture of your data the way I do with Fitbit, MFP Android, and trendweight.com. You can see screencaps from them in my post here.

The spreadsheet uses Trendweight and Fitbit if these are your tools. Its purpose is to give one confidence as to the accuracy of their Cal In/Cal Out logging.

For example my friend whose data are in the example knows that her tracking under-estimates her burns by more than 3%.

Thus she no longer has an excuse for being in the green all the time given she wants to maintain ;-)

Thanks for the clarification!

PAV8888 wrote: »

Your adjustment may work as intended if negative adjustments were not enabled.

Fitbit uses the TDEE method MFP the NEAT+Exercise.

"exercise adjustments" between Fitbit and MFP are NOT exercise. They are an accounting transaction where Fitbit's estimate of your calories out for the day replaces MFP's estimate.

Caveat: on days when Fitbit detects more activity you get a positive adjustment and eat more, as correctly you should. But without negative adjustments enabled you do not get induced to eat less on the days when Fitbit detects less activity than what MFP estimated.

Of course, regardless of what we would like to believe MFP, Fitbit, and everything else are educated guesses. So, too, is our logging.

After a reasonable period of time (Males 15-30 days, Females affected by water retention due to hormonal fluctuations 4-6 weeks) you evaluate your logging and your progress and decide if adjustments are needed.

Some of my friends use a spreadsheet I've cobbled up to evaluate their logging.

It is actually fairly simple (just does averages) and of course cannot account for body composition changes (fat and lean mass do not have the same caloric values).

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1VDmqNpLPu7sbQSochUJNXdp2F7AN15AGgkvS3zLw1GU

Love this spreadsheet @PAV8888.
I don't have much data in it yet, but so far it looks like I'm overestimating my intake or my Fitbit Blaze is actually underestimating a bit more than I thought. I'm really interested to what it will say a few weeks from now.
I'd love to log the data from previous months and see what it says, but the past couple months my food logging has been sloppy. So I started it at 10 days ago when I tightened up my logging. 10 days isn't really enough time to say 100% for sure one way or the other, but so far it's calculating a 9.33% underestimation.

msalicia116 wrote: »

papple227 wrote: »

are you able to eat all of your Fitbit calories if you sent your activity level to sedentary? For awhile my activity level was set to "lightly active" and I ate all my Fitbit calories and stalled in weight loss. I just recently switched to "sedentary" in hopes that I will start losing again.

Can someone please clarify, but I don't see where you can even select an activity level in Fitbit. As far as I understand, that is a MFP setting. I can chose my deficit on my Fitbit, and it will give me how many calories I need in real time according to my activity. There are no "exercise calories" seperate from the calories they say you can have to reach your deficit. It's just, you have this many calories left. Why wouldn't you eat those, when that is the deficit you selected?

What am I missing?

OP is talking about the MFP settings in regards to activity level.

There is actually a way to set Fitbit to "Sedentary" in regards to the calories it says you can eat on the dashboard. Basically instead of looking at what your days are typically like and estimating how much you can eat for the day off of that, Fitbit will give you a deficit off your BMR until you start moving and only add calories to eat to your food tile when you have earned them. Example: If I set it to Sedentary and a 500 calorie deficit (on Fitbit...this has nothing to do with MFP), I would start the day with Fitbit saying I could eat 748 calories. That's however with no activity. I just came back from a walk which put my calorie burn at 655. Fitbit then estimates I will only burn my BMR for the rest of the day and adjusts my calories according to that. For me, that moves it from 748 to 960. As I move more throughout the day that number of calories Fitbit's dashboard says I can eat will increase.

Hopefully I didn't just confuse you more. Basically there is the default setting of personalized which estimates how much you can eat and be in a deficit at the beginning of the day based on your previous history. Then there is sedentary which starts you off with absolutely no activity accounted for and you have to earn the calories as the day goes on.

If you're using a Fitbit and synced to MFP then the end result will be the same regardless of your activity level settings in MFP.

Example: lets say MFP thinks you'll burn 2000/day on sedentary and 2250/day on lightly active. You want to lose 1/week so MFP will tell you to eat 1500/sedentary or 1750/lightly active. Either way, if your Fitbit is synced and Fitbit says you ACTUALLY burned 2350, then MFP will take that info and tell you to eat 1500+350 OR 1750+100. Either way, the end result after MFP adjusts per Fitbit: 1850.

If you're not losing weight eating them all, then leave some of the adjustment 'on the table', increase your planned deficit, and/or improve accuracy in your logging methods.

papple227 wrote: »

are you able to eat all of your Fitbit calories if you sent your activity level to sedentary? For awhile my activity level was set to "lightly active" and I ate all my Fitbit calories and stalled in weight loss. I just recently switched to "sedentary" in hopes that I will start losing again.