Please help

I have MFP and Fitbit. I use MFP as main for calories and water intake and Fitbit for tracking excercise, sleep, etc. Fitbit wants you to consume basically ALL the calories you burn from excercising within a 50 calorie range, and MFP just displays where you are and cautions if you're under 1000 calories for the day. Decide what works best for you and how much you need to eat within the ranges provided.

Most of this will depend on your settings in each app. I set MFP to sedentary (which I'm not), and it sets a baseline. What I really target in terms of calories (with ambitious goals of 2lb/wk for now) is about -1000 from my Fitbit calorie burns - in general.

I'm a bit of a numbers geek - you don't have to be one to do this - and I log the calories I eat using MFP and the calories I burn according to Fitbit. I see "under budget" and "over budget" all the time (because my Fitbit setting is set to a 1000 calorie deficit. It doesn't take much to miss on either side, but like most things, I look at averages and trends. Eight weeks in (with five weeks of close tracking), here are my averages (for those 5 weeks):

Avg Calories in: 1995 (MFP sedentary setting = 1500, Max in: 2652, Min in: 1330)
Avg Calories out: 3184 (Max out: 3729, Min out: 2652)

5 week deficit (actually 36 days): 43,984 = expected weight loss of 12.6
Actual weight loss during that time = 11.8.

This is pretty close, given scale fluctuations due to fluid retention and scale inaccuracies (I mean to the tenth of a pound - really?). The previous 3 weeks prior to selecting how I was going to track seriously was also close to 2 lbs / week loss.

What all of that says to me is that my Fitbit is close enough to being accurate to use for calorie burn information. (Most of my exercise burn is cardio with strength - not straight lifting, so I understand it's closer to accurate in those situations). I believe it slightly overestimates the burn, but not enough to be substantial.

There are two schools of thought with respect to your eating targets (not addressing macros here):
1. Use the MFP sedentary settings as your goal and eat back a portion of your exercise calories. You should always do this because you need those calories to fuel your activity and you need activity.
2. Use an estimated TDEE based on your expected activity level, and eat at an estimated deficit from that.

I use option #2 to target my calories and use MFP to track calories in. In my case, my calories burned fall in between the moderate and active points in the TDEE calculations. In my case moderate TDEE is about 3054 on average between 8 different sites - I told you I was a numbers geek Active TDEE is 3359. My Fitbit says I burn somewhere between those 2 most days. Given the weight loss so far, I have no reason to believe the numbers I am getting from Fitbit aren't trustworthy for this purpose. I burn about 500 less on my rest days (one day per week without a workout).

After all of that, you should do whatever is easiest for you, but the most important part is accurately tracking what your are putting in. Both scenarios are easy once you are in the habit of logging. I like #2 because I can see through the day what my burn is and if I have room for a treat once in awhile. Hint: I usually do have room.

[sorry for the length]

veganbaum wrote: »

This is not entirely correct.

If you set up MFP as it is intended, you choose your setting based on your daily activity without exercise. That may be sedentary, it may be active, but it is without exercise. Once you exercise, you are meant to log that in and eat those calories back to keep your deficit where you told MFP you want it to be (but many people start off eating 50-75% back to account for overestimated burns - there are also some who eat 100% back and find them accurate). If fitbit is adding more calories, you should also eat at least some of those.

Is your fitbit synced to MFP or are you just going between the two? Fitbit will adjust your daily calories based on your daily movement. If you have had your fitbit for a little while and find that it adjusts a usual amount and you don't like it, you can adjust your activity level accordingly.

For instance, I have MFP set to sedentary based on my employment and I have fitbit and MFP synced. However, I am rarely actually sedentary. Fitbit adjusts my daily intake by anywhere from 200-400+ calories a day (usually around 400), depending on how much I move. I could adjust MFP to the lightly active or active setting and have a smaller daily adjustment, but I don't mostly because it doesn't bother me. I then eat the calories that fitbit adds to my MFP calories, and that keeps me in the deficit I told MFP I wanted. I track my weekly deficit on fitbit.

If fitbit is telling you to eat significantly more calories than MFP, you really should. Creating a bigger deficit sounds good in theory, but in the long term it is not.

You might find this useful:

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/group/1290-fitbit-users

I added emphasis to the quote above. I think we are on the same train of thought; I likely wasn't as clear as I intended. I primarily use MFP for tracking. For targeting, I use the Fitbit. In other words, I ultimately aim for my -1000 give or take based on by Fitbit budget. Based on my weight loss results I'm not terribly worried if I end up at -1100 on average because Fitbit might be overestimating slightly OR I may be underestimating intake slightly. I'm in the ballpark as it is. The reason I set MFP to sedentary as opposed to what Fitbit activity levels say was mostly to understand how that process works.

If I do anything at this point, it will probably be in the direction of increasing my intake. My intention is not to create the biggest deficit possible, but to create the proper one for optimizing fitness and weight (in that order).

Thanks for your feedback.