Eating all Fitbit calories
papple227
Posts: 34 Member
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.
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Replies
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I've done that at one point and stalled and maybe gained a lb or two. Your best bet is to use the numbers MFP gives you and still to that.1
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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
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I tested over a three month period, activity set to sedentary and eating back my Fitbit calories. It worked well, I lost at the rate I was supposed to.4
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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.1 -
I don't eat them all the time, but they are there to be eaten much like when you log exercise and MFP provides exercise calories.
I use them as a buffer. If I'm hungrier that day, I'll eat into them. If I'm not, it's just a buffer for another higher calorie day.1 -
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.3 -
Im set to sedentary for this reason. I probably eat about 50-75% of my calories between whats earned from a workout or through steps Ive taken. Fitbit step tracker (no matter the extent of adjusting the settings) isnt 100% accurate so I never eat it all back.2
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You can eat your exercise calories back at any activity level. I am set to lightly active. I just don't earn any calories back until I have exceeded that setting. After 2500 steps I start seeing calories added. If I am set to sedentary I just see extra calories sooner. Same thing if I am set to active, seeing the extra after lots of steps/exercise, of course.
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IN 6 months I ate back all my fitbit calories and lost 30 pounds. I'm back on the wagon again and eating most of them (sometimes I'm just not hungry for 2k calories a day) but I had no problem eating my fitbit calories and losing.4
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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 ;-)3 -
I eat all of my Fitbit calories and I'm losing steadily. I feel like MFP's exercise estimates are REALLY high2
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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! 1 -
I'll eat some or all of mine back if I'm hungry, or dont eay (m)any back if I'm not. I won't force feed myself just to eat those exercise calories back.
I also don't do high impact exercise, my only exercise is walking. I would probably want every last calorie if i was doing miles and miles on the bike or running or heavy duty weight lifting etc.3 -
This content has been removed.
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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.1 -
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?0 -
msalicia116 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.0 -
shadow2soul wrote: »msalicia116 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.
That's exactly how I understood it. So when I quoted the person who asked if 1. she should eat back all her Fitbit calories if she was set at sedentary, I was confused. Yes, you eat all your Fitbit calories. And 2. She said she didn't lose when she had her activity to lightly active and ate her Fitbit calories. Again, this part I don't understand. You just eat the calories Fitbit say you have, and it will increase with your activity as you go. There is no use or ignore "exercise calories", that would be an MFP option. The Fitbit will be sure you are eating at your preferred deficit, so those are the calories you eat.
So, we are on the same page for sure! It's the 2 points she made that I can't wrap my head around.0 -
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.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.
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msalicia116 wrote: »What am I missing?
The OP is looking at her available food left on MFP.
You are looking at your available food left on Fitbit.
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