Calories burned and Fitbit

ColoJessie
ColoJessie Posts: 11 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
For those of you who have their Fitbit synced to MFP, do you eat back all your calories burned, a portion or none. I have MFP set on sedentary so it seems that it starts giving me calories back after I hit a certain number of steps? Up until now I have just been manually logging my cardio using the app parameters and didn't have a rule about it but tended to only eat some back since I didn't know how accurate the calculations were.

So tell me, what has your experience with this been? Thanks in advance!

Replies

  • ssajwa1
    ssajwa1 Posts: 18 Member
    I hope you get an answer because I'm wondering the same thing. It depends on the day, but sometimes I do eat back some of the calories. It makes me feel better that I'm always under my calorie goal -- but not necessarily under the base calorie goal.
  • macgurlnet
    macgurlnet Posts: 1,946 Member
    It'll depend on how accurate your Fitbit is.

    Some people (like me) find the Fitbit calorie burn estimate to be really accurate. I've been eating back all of my exercise calories since I first gone one 2 years ago, and have lost and maintained weight as expected.

    It also depends on what you do for exercise. Fitbits are mostly step trackers, so things like walking & running will be more accurately estimated than other activities, like biking or swimming.

    MFP is set up to give you a calorie goal WITHOUT exercise factored in. If you have a Fitbit synced and get additional calories, you should be able to eat them all.

    Decide if you want to eat back 100% or 50% of the calories and do that for 4-6 weeks, then evaluate your weight loss over that time. You can increase or decrease the amount you're eating back at that point.

    ~Lyssa
  • SCoil123
    SCoil123 Posts: 2,110 Member
    I eat them. I've found it to be pretty accurate. I log my workouts on fitbit too so no activity gets entered onto MFP.
  • karahm78
    karahm78 Posts: 505 Member
    edited January 2017
    I find my Fitbit burn to be extremely accurate so I am comfortable eating them.... However I usually try to eat half of them though to give done cushion/bonus burn while still enjoying some extra calories for the activity
  • Maxematics
    Maxematics Posts: 2,287 Member
    When I first started losing weight I didn't eat back my exercise calories at all. It was a huge mistake and when I started feeling hungry from overtraining and undereating, I'd eat no more than 50%. After I went from 139 to 120 pounds losing 2.2 pounds per week, my body got hungrier and I had to eat more back. I'm so lucky I didn't sacrifice my body composition due to that. That was a year and a half ago. Now I happily eat back all of them most of the time and I'm 113 pounds. If I'm under my calorie goal too often, I lose more weight than Fitbit assumes. I was 107 in the summer and purposely gained some weight to build muscle. My surpluses via Fitbit seemed to be spot on.
  • SusanMFindlay
    SusanMFindlay Posts: 1,804 Member
    edited January 2017
    I eat back my FitBit adjustment calories. Before I got the FitBit and just picked what looked like an appropriate activity level, I lost weight a lot faster than I was expecting to (and faster than is a good idea) following MFP's recommendation. The vast majority of my "extra" calories come from being on my feet all day; I only "work out" for a couple of hours a week. I do not log my workouts on MFP, but FitBit does tend to credit me with more calories for them than if I was just walking. (I have a Charge 2 which includes a heartrate monitor.)

    My experience has been that, if my logging of food is accurate (and I think it is), FitBit does a very good job of estimating my daily calorie burn.
  • ssajwa1
    ssajwa1 Posts: 18 Member
    Thanks, this was helpful.
  • Bearbo27
    Bearbo27 Posts: 339 Member
    I always eat most if not all of my Fitbit calories back and have lost just fine and according to plan (currently am set for 1.5 lbs a week).

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