Eating all the calories!

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SierraFatToSkinny
SierraFatToSkinny Posts: 463 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
Okay! So I purchased a Fitbit Blaze earlier today. I'm still a little bit confused as to how to go about my new life as a HR monitor owner.

I have it synced to my phone and it's adjusting calories for me. I wore it for half the day and it adjusted about 300 calories. (C25K Week 6 Day 1 and then a walk around the block.)

I'm 5'8"and 266lbs. I set MFP goals to 2lbs loss a week. Sedentary setting gives me a daily food allotment of 1480.

I plan to eat back all the adjusted calories. ALL. ;)

Am I good to go? Will that lead to a 2lbs loss a week?
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Replies

  • deviousme7
    deviousme7 Posts: 61 Member
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    I agree, only eat half at the most
  • frawley23
    frawley23 Posts: 31 Member
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    I eat between 1/2 and 3/4 of my Fitbit adjusted calories and with tight, consistent food logging am losing at or under my estimated weight loss of 1lb a week. I'd start eating back a percentage and see what the scale says.
  • Silentpadna
    Silentpadna Posts: 1,306 Member
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    I've got a Fitbit also (a Charge HR). While I am thinking it may be overestimating my calories burned, it seems to match what the various TDEE sites say I would be burning based on me thinking active and entering moderate. The calories burned sits right between the two most days. As a 225-lb male, I've been keeping an average deficit of around 1100 calories (I'm actually trying to eat a little bit more, but 1950 calories of nutritious food is pretty filling).

    Anyway my data is limited as I have not been tracking closely except for the past 4 weeks or so. It's been a relatively steady 2 lbs/week. I've noticed that I get heavier a day or so after strength workouts, so the weight fluctuates as expected. So with the caveat that this is limited data and still short term, my Fitbit may be closer to accurate than I expected it to be.
  • SierraFatToSkinny
    SierraFatToSkinny Posts: 463 Member
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    w0su575alk2u.png
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    How reasonable is that burn... seems inflated.
  • Susieq_1994
    Susieq_1994 Posts: 5,361 Member
    edited March 2017
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    I find it pretty crazy, but you're a bit taller and heavier than I am (5'6, 212 lbs). According to my own stats plugged into multiple TDEE calculators and mostly confirmed via tracking my numbers in a spreadsheet, 10,000 steps gets me 2400 calories with my sedentary TDEE being ~2150. I'm not sure how much more your extra pounds and inches 'buy' you, but I would have to get around 35,000 steps for that calorie number.

    Edit: Clarifying something I didn't type very clearly.
  • SusanMFindlay
    SusanMFindlay Posts: 1,804 Member
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    If you have MFP set to lose 2 pounds/week, eat back all the exercise calories.

    Then pay attention to how much weight you actually lose and adjust from there. If you lose less than the expected 8 pounds/month, cut back on how many exercise calories you eat. If you lose more than expected, eat a little more (relative to your goal; understand that your calorie goal will naturally decrease a little as you lose weight). If you lose as expected, stick to the plan.

    The reason that I think you should start off eating back all the exercise calories is that if they're right and you don't eat them back, you lose weight faster than is healthy. If they're wrong and you eat them back anyway, you lose weight slightly slower than expected - but, with a 2 pound/week goal, you still lose weight pretty quickly (worst case scenario would be 1.5 pounds/week if you eat back 250 calories more than you burned).

    If you were only aiming to lose 0.5 pounds/week, I'd advise you to be more cautious about not eating back too much. But aiming for 2 pounds/week, it's more important not to eat back too little.
  • jennybearlv
    jennybearlv Posts: 1,519 Member
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    I use Garmin and anytime I see Fitbit calories posted they always seem crazy high in comparison. Garmin used to say I burned about 400 calories walking steep hills for 3 miles, not running so that could be the difference, when I was in the 260's. Last time I had a burn that high I ran 4 miles through sand and gravel then walked another 2 miles for a total of about 20000 steps for the day. In my experience Garmin underestimates my burn a bit, but that's still a big difference. I'm 5'3", 220.
  • SierraFatToSkinny
    SierraFatToSkinny Posts: 463 Member
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    My only exercise of the day was 20-25ish minutes of trail running. The trail was moderate for the most part. There were a couple staircases I had to run up and down.

    I also ran faster today than I would typically... taking breaks between runs allows me to kick into a higher gear.

    And I was also rather ravenous tonight.... I'm hungry again right now. So maybe I did burn a lot more.

    But... probably not 1100 calories worth. That seems too excessive.
  • mlinci
    mlinci Posts: 403 Member
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    Over 1,000 calories for 10k steps does sound a bit excessive. I'm 5'5 and 140lbs and I get about 400 calories for 10k steps. But at your height you can certainly eat more than 1,500 calories a day and lose weight.

    PS you ate 0.2 of a chicken liver? That sounds more like you used it in a magic potion rather than in a recipe :)
  • Hoshiko
    Hoshiko Posts: 179 Member
    edited March 2017
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    The first thing I noticed was the chicken liver too! :)

    It does seem a bit high to me. But, I agree with other people that at this stage you should probably eat back almost all of your daily burn and then adjust from there. That way you don't short change yourself, but it will also give you feedback on how accurate your fitbit is.

    P.S. nice job on the running!
  • amusedmonkey
    amusedmonkey Posts: 10,330 Member
    edited March 2017
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    Is your tracker heart-rate based? These are reasonably accurate for some people more than others because they try to guess at your max heart rate using formulas and those people happen to fall within an acceptable range of it, but may be less accurate for your own individual heart rate, plus they don't take into account fitness level like more advanced heart rate monitors. As suggested, start by eating whatever you determine to be a good percentage 25%, 50%, 100%, doesn't matter, and just watch what your weight does then adjust up or down accordingly to match your planned loss.

    ETA: also keep in mind that some trackers try to "guess" your activity level for the rest of the day by using your activity level during exercise, giving you more eat-back calories than the actual value. You can see if this is happening by checking your extra calories in the evening, then going back next day to see if they settled at a lower value.
  • SierraFatToSkinny
    SierraFatToSkinny Posts: 463 Member
    edited March 2017
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    Lol! @mlinci @hoshiko the chicken liver was part of a meal prep. I forgot to add it to the recipe so I had to tack it on to the meal. I mostly work from my phone and I'm limited on tweaking recipes. :D

    (I'm up way too late....) I ended up eating most of the calories. I figured 2400 wasn't too far off from what I was eating when I began losing weight and if I'm hungry, then I might as well enjoy it guilt free. I can be more moderate if I need to later.
  • mir1104
    mir1104 Posts: 101 Member
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    I burn 1000-1200 cals in an olympic triathlon, 1.5km open water swim/40km bike/10k run.
    You can use this as a comparison on the estimation and what you did.
  • katharmonic
    katharmonic Posts: 5,720 Member
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    That's suspicious for some double counting to me. There's no way that a 25 minute trail run burned 1000 calories. Investigate under Exercise in MFP to see if things are getting counted twice. I have found fitbit/Garmin to be pretty accurate but sometimes weird things happen.
  • Maxematics
    Maxematics Posts: 2,287 Member
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    It's really going to take some time to assess how much you should be eating back. I feel like more often than not I read posts about how Fitbit was overestimating so much for people but I have to wonder how many of those people actually weighed all of their food to the gram to ensure accuracy. Please don't let that deter you from eating. Like others have suggested, I'd start with 50 to 75% depending on how hungry you are.

    I've been a Fitbit user since July 2015; I started with the Charge HR and upgraded to the Charge 2 when it was released. I didn't believe the burns either at first, so only ate back 25 to 50%. Now that I'm leaner and don't have as much body fat to sustain me, I have to eat them all back. In fact I have to eat more than Fitbit says I do, as it was underestimating my TDEE. I'm 5'3" and 113 pounds or so; my Fitbit gives me 2100 to 2500 daily and I'm doing just fine. What you're getting doesn't seem all that farfetched to me, honestly. Good luck!

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