Fitbit question
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I eat most of them back. I've lost weight just fine.1
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Exceeding one's correctly selected goal is not always a good thing.
To achieve one's goals as set by MFP one eats back their exercise calories.
A Fitbit exercise adjustment does not pertain to any specific exercise, should not be really called an exercise adjustment, and whether accurate or not, the accuracy is not affected by "MFP overestimates exercise" issues".
It is an accounting adjustment to equalize what MFP expected you to have burned by the end of the day based on your logging, and what your Fitbit has recorded as your burn by the end of the day. At midnight.
It can be rendered less accurate when you enter exercise activity manually on MFP. Manual MFP activities push through and overwrites what your Fitbit detects during that time frame.
Prudent loggers will either only record food in MFP and exercise on Fitbit, or will go to the Fitbit website and delete any activities that are imported from MFP.
That way your Fitbit will give you it's own unadulterated estimate of your daily burn.
MFP and Fitbit use the same base formula to calculate your BMR, and in general, if your logging is accurate, Fitbit will spit total daily energy expenditure (tdee) figures that are within 5% of reality for most people.
Note that this still leaves a 100 Cal margin of error in a 2000 Cal day. But so do food logging errors.
Unless errors are systematic they tend to cancel as opposed to reinforce each other.
So, if the deficit you've chosen is appropriate, the easiest thing to do is eat according to Fitbit and MFP while logging as accurately as you can. Connect Fitbit.com to trendweight.com (both free) and get a handle on your weight trend over time. After 4-6 weeks compare your progress to your expected progress. And adjust if needed.3 -
phyllis731 wrote: »I don't eat back my calories. Extra calories available = a win in my book. I'm pretty sure calories left is how we lose weight.
Like I said in my post, that's fine if we're talking 100-200 calories. My average daily calorie burn (*without* workouts) is ~1,000 calories more than my sedentary burn would be. It's ~700 calories/day more than what MFP tells me if I follow its instructions and pick "lightly active" because I teach for a living.
Not eating those back (or, at least, not eating back most of them) would *not* be a win.2 -
Those who use fotnits, do you eat back your cals earned?
Not always. I found that there would be some obvious screw-ups, like if you mow the lawn with the thing on, the vibration adds a bunch of steps, which is annoying (I got numbers like 15000, which is ridiculous.). I'd like to know the actual steps during lawn mowing. When I went cycling or swimming, it added nothing. (It annoyed me that it wasn't waterproof like the newer ones.) If most of your exercise is walking and running, then you can trust the numbers. If you do stuff that it misses or that it overestimates, then you can't. In the end, I un-linked it and added the calories manually when they seemed reasonable.
PS I'm pretty impressed with Google Fit, which is an Android app.1 -
Jthanmyfitnesspal wrote: »PS I'm pretty impressed with Google Fit, which is an Android app.
I am most definitely vehemently unimpressed with google fit.
Google Fit persistently (and criminally) under-estimates my burn.
I just did January for the heck of it. January was *take your pick* a 0.9lbs trending weight loss or 1.4lbs scale weight loss for me.
My food as logged on MFP for 31 days was 83729 Cal or 2700 Cal a day.
Taking into account the loss, my caloric expenditure was between 2800 and 2850 Cal a day.
Google Fit gave me a maintenance level of 2355 Cal a day.
This would be about 500 Cal less a day than actual maintenance.
Fitbit by comparison is over-estimating me by maybe 150 Cal a day.2 -
Jthanmyfitnesspal wrote: »like if you mow the lawn with the thing on, the vibration adds a bunch of steps, which is annoying (I got numbers like 15000, which is ridiculous.). I'd like to know the actual steps during lawn mowing.
Have you tried putting it in your back pocket instead of wearing it on your wrist? It should still catch the steps, but the vibrations will be dampened.
Google Fit never worked for me, but that's in large part because I only carry my phone with me if I'm traveling a significant distance, so it misses all my incidental steps (which means it misses a significant fraction of my daily activity - all walking I do while teaching, all walking to and from class, all playing with the kids at home, all doing chores at home, etc.).1 -
I do a lot of hand motions at work as a music teacher. I pull it off my wrist and stick it in a pocket or hook it around a belt loop. It seems to work well there too. It probably would help with vibration issues.Jthanmyfitnesspal wrote: »Those who use fotnits, do you eat back your cals earned?
Not always. I found that there would be some obvious screw-ups, like if you mow the lawn with the thing on, the vibration adds a bunch of steps, which is annoying (I got numbers like 15000, which is ridiculous.). I'd like to know the actual steps during lawn mowing. When I went cycling or swimming, it added nothing. (It annoyed me that it wasn't waterproof like the newer ones.) If most of your exercise is walking and running, then you can trust the numbers. If you do stuff that it misses or that it overestimates, then you can't. In the end, I un-linked it and added the calories manually when they seemed reasonable.
PS I'm pretty impressed with Google Fit, which is an Android app.
And I log cycling and swimming as exercise. It won't give you distance- for cycling you need to enter the distance for an accurate count, but it will calculate calories.
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Jthanmyfitnesspal wrote: »Those who use fotnits, do you eat back your cals earned?
Not always. I found that there would be some obvious screw-ups, like if you mow the lawn with the thing on, the vibration adds a bunch of steps, which is annoying (I got numbers like 15000, which is ridiculous.). I'd like to know the actual steps during lawn mowing. When I went cycling or swimming, it added nothing. (It annoyed me that it wasn't waterproof like the newer ones.) If most of your exercise is walking and running, then you can trust the numbers. If you do stuff that it misses or that it overestimates, then you can't. In the end, I un-linked it and added the calories manually when they seemed reasonable.
PS I'm pretty impressed with Google Fit, which is an Android app.
Good tip, mow the lawn before boy's night out!0 -
I do most of the time. Seems to work fine.
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I eat back around half.... losing a little faster than my selected loss, but I like to keep that buffer to cover any logging errors and perhaps a little bonus loss as incentive to keep active1
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I do a lot of hand motions at work as a music teacher. I pull it off my wrist and stick it in a pocket or hook it around a belt loop. It seems to work well there too. It probably would help with vibration issues.Jthanmyfitnesspal wrote: »Those who use fotnits, do you eat back your cals earned?
Not always. I found that there would be some obvious screw-ups, like if you mow the lawn with the thing on, the vibration adds a bunch of steps, which is annoying (I got numbers like 15000, which is ridiculous.). I'd like to know the actual steps during lawn mowing. When I went cycling or swimming, it added nothing. (It annoyed me that it wasn't waterproof like the newer ones.) If most of your exercise is walking and running, then you can trust the numbers. If you do stuff that it misses or that it overestimates, then you can't. In the end, I un-linked it and added the calories manually when they seemed reasonable.
PS I'm pretty impressed with Google Fit, which is an Android app.
And I log cycling and swimming as exercise. It won't give you distance- for cycling you need to enter the distance for an accurate count, but it will calculate calories.
Here is a perfect example. I checked and had about 4,000 steps prior to 8:00 pm. After a 4 hour show I registered 24,000 steps.
Granted, feet and arms moving at a steady pace and heart rate definitely elevated. For sure it was a good cardio experience... but not
equal to 20,000 paces. Calories on the Fitbit registered over 4,000 which was an increase of around 2500 from reading prior to show.
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If you have problems with hand motions, try the Fitbit One. I wear it clipped on my bra, DH on his pants pocket and we get very accurate counts.3
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Here is a perfect example. I checked and had about 4,000 steps prior to 8:00 pm. After a 4 hour show I registered 24,000 steps.
Granted, feet and arms moving at a steady pace and heart rate definitely elevated. For sure it was a good cardio experience... but not
equal to 20,000 paces. Calories on the Fitbit registered over 4,000 which was an increase of around 2500 from reading prior to show.
Thank you for being a music teachers! Some of my favorite people are music teachers.
That's the downside of Fitbit: occasional overestimate of steps. The downside of phone apps: frequent underestimate of steps. (You'd have to have it in a hip pocket all the time to get a good reading. Not at all good if it's in your purse!). A big advantage of Fitbit is they can monitor HR, but not when on your belt loop. So there is some finesse needed to interpret the calorie estimate from either one. This is what led me to un-link the apps.0 -
Yes, I eat all of them back, including calories "just" from steps. I eat 1200 calories as a "baseline", but as a veterinary student I am on my feet all day, and since I work with large animals (horses and cows), I can have quite active days when patients are non-compliant, to put it nicely haha :-)
I need my food and energy to be able to to a good job, so I eat all my FitBit calories. And then when I chill on the weekends I just get the 1200 a day. It works well, I'm losing weight steadily with this method.1 -
Jthanmyfitnesspal wrote: »Those who use fotnits, do you eat back your cals earned?
Not always. I found that there would be some obvious screw-ups, like if you mow the lawn with the thing on, the vibration adds a bunch of steps, which is annoying (I got numbers like 15000, which is ridiculous.). I'd like to know the actual steps during lawn mowing. When I went cycling or swimming, it added nothing. (It annoyed me that it wasn't waterproof like the newer ones.) If most of your exercise is walking and running, then you can trust the numbers. If you do stuff that it misses or that it overestimates, then you can't. In the end, I un-linked it and added the calories manually when they seemed reasonable.
PS I'm pretty impressed with Google Fit, which is an Android app.
Put it in your pocket. That's what I do when shopping or pushing a stroller
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