Eating back calories and Fitbit

Naruya wrote: »

As everyone said, MFP is designed for you to eat back your exercise calories. However, your regular daily activity is already included in the MFP average. From experience, sedentary expects you to take around 5000 steps before you start getting credit for extra calories. That's where the problem with Fitbit imo comes in: it overestimates. I find it hard to believe you're burning 300 calories with just 2000 steps.

Take me for example:
My BMR (calories burned by just being alive) is 1550
My NEAT (MFP calculated calories burned before exercise based on sedentary) is 1800

With the above example, there's a 250 calorie difference between the calories I burn by doing nothing at all, and what I burn if I don't exercise during the day, but do walk around a bit and do daily things. So I'd have to burn 250 calories with walking (which for me seems to be around 5k steps) before I would get credit for EXTRA calories. If I were to walk less than 5k, I'd get negative calories and would be able to eat less than 1800. This is how it works with my Apple Watch. When I had a Fitbit before it also overestimated for me and gave me too much credit.

So bottom line: I don't think your Fitbit is being accurate and is giving you too many extra calories for little work. But if you're hungry your deficit is too large and you should eat more, I think wanting to lose 2 lbs a week is too quick and leaves you with too little calories.

I think you are putting too much stock in numbers like BMR, and the MFP NEAT estimate. I also think you're suggesting that the 300 cals that OP is referencing is specific to her step count, when in fact, it is a calorie adjustment that is basically trueing up what MFP thinks she is burning, with what FitBit says she is actually burning.

In my experience, for people that see large calorie adjustments from FitBit and then think they must be overinflated, it is because they have entered information into MFP that suggests they are less active than they actually are. Those exercise adjustments are reconciling that, with what FitBit says they actually burn (which is more than just the steps, it includes the calories burned from BMR as well). Often when they talk about their actual activity, how many steps they get, etc - it turns out that if they chose an activity level that is more appropriate (like in OP's example - I would think lightly active is a better setting based on her job and her step count described), then the adjustments become more representative of any purposeful exercise.

And because I think it's helpful to share numbers for clarity:
I'm 5'2 and 120 lbs. When I originally got my FitBit I was set as sedentary, and weighed about 135. I was averaging about 10K steps/day and was seeing adjustments of 500-600 cals, just from walking, and thought that couldn't possibly be right. I got the good advice on here, that taking 10K steps/day is not sedentary, desk job or no desk job. I changed my activity level to lightly active, which gave me more baseline calories, and then I started seeing lower adjustments and not getting positive calorie adjustments until I was over 6,000 or so steps. Now, I'm in maintenance, but I average 15K steps/day and have my setting at Active. I don't get positive adjustments till I'm over 10K steps usually.

MFP thinks my NEAT maintenance cals are 1860. FitBit says my total cals burned is b/w 2100-2300. So my adjustments are usually in the neighborhood of 250-450 cals, depending how active I am that day.

I ate back the calories while losing, and now while maintaining, and they've always been accurate for me. For what it's worth OP....