New Fitbit and not quite sure about the adjustments?

I'm 1.5 inches shorter than you and about your weight. 5000 steps is a little over 2 miles for me, definitely not 1700 calories. Also, my FitBit One doesn't start giving me credit for steps until I've made over 2000 of them.

My One made sense right away, but I hear all the time that people need to give their FBs a few days to "get to know" them.

We're very similar (I'm 5'8" SW205 CW194 GW170)
I have a zip and I can tell you those exercise calories seem WAY high.
Fitbit/MFP tend to overestimate calories so I try not to eat back more than 50% of them. I'm at 1200 but get anywhere from 200-800 more from daily exercise - so I generally try to eat 1300-1600 daily.
Maybe you're looking at your total burn? Because a day like yesterday when I walked 4 miles/9300 steps fitbit says I burned 2300 calories. That's total. That's not 2300 I can eat on top of what MFP tells me to eat. Does that make sense?
Do you have your fitbit synced with MFP? Because if so it will make the daily calorie adjustment for you. Just know it's usually high and don't eat it all back.

In theory, you should be able to just treat your Fitbit adjustment like any exercise calories and eat however many "calories remaining" mfp tells you. However, it will take some adjustment period to determine if the Fitbit is accurate for you and/or if you need to make some setting changes for it to work better. My Fitbit is accurate for me. Some others say theirs is high, others low. You need to log your food, look your actual change in weight over a month or so, compare it to what you expected to lose and that will help you figure out if the Fitbit is accurate. "That seems low/high" isn't a good way nor is "mfp/my HrM/some online calculator only gave me 300 for that walk and Fitbit says 450/200" (Fitbit measures 24/7 total calories burned and should only be compared to something else that measures 24/7 total calories burned).

In your specific situation, you've just gotten your Fitbit and you flew all over god's green earth (I'm guessing perhaps into different time zones). I'm thinking there are so many wires crossed between Fitbit, mfp and everything else that it doesn't even know what to spit out. Wait until you've had it set up an entire 24 hours in one time zone before you start worrying about what the calorie adjustment is.

Also remember that how the adjustment works is that Fitbit tells mfp what you burned for the entire day. Mfp also calculates what you burned for the entire day (based on whatever your regular activity level is plus any exercise you have logged). The difference between the two is what is logged as your Fitbit adjustment. So also make sure that any exercise you log on mfp is logged with the correct start/end times. You shouldn't really need to log exercise on mfp, but if you do-make sure you have the times correct. This is another reason a change in time zones may be causing a funky adjustment.

What is your activity level set at in MFP? The lower the level, the higher the adjustments

jelleigh wrote: »

Ok. So I'm a full day past all the crazy timezone things (also just reread my last post - autocorrect + jet leg is a bad combo ! ) so everything should be not all now. I'm halfway through my day and have taken 7000 steps and have a Fitbit adjustment in MFP of 630 calories. I'm set to sedentary in MFP. Does that sound right to everyone?

MFP may take some of those away at the end of the day - I tend to do a lot of my walking morning/afternoon. MFP will adjust my calories way high sometimes but then they start to readjust (drop) as the day progresses and I stop walking so much. I was told basically that the program assumes that if you're walking 1000 steps an hour that that's what you're doing all day and when you slack from that, it readjusts. And even so, 600 calories of burn is a serious workout - it's doubtful you're burning that much or should eat that much back.
Like I said before, we're similar stats, I walk 8000-12000 steps a day, I do my best to eat back only 50-75% of the fitbit calories and I'm losing each week.
Feel free to send me a friend request and you can see my diary/calorie adjustments! I'm on my 9th week and I'm finally getting the hang of it I think!

jelleigh wrote: »

Ok. So I'm a full day past all the crazy timezone things (also just reread my last post - autocorrect + jet leg is a bad combo ! ) so everything should be not all now. I'm halfway through my day and have taken 7000 steps and have a Fitbit adjustment in MFP of 630 calories. I'm set to sedentary in MFP. Does that sound right to everyone?

Yes... sedentary is usually around 3,000 steps. Since you are doing more than double that amount is why you are seeing the larger adjustment.

If you consistently doing that many steps you could update your activity level and get smaller adjustments. I like to see the big adjustments as it motivates me to move, and I also have some days with only 3-4K steps (work related) and I don't want to overeat on those days.