Activity tracker necessary?

If your calorie goal comes from MFP your very much supposed to eat your exercise calories. You're also supposed to try to find a reasonable estimate for what you actually burned, though.

Activity tracker are convenient but not strictly necessary. And you can use a phone app if you can stand being tethered to your phone. Hence the convenience of the smaller device with a longer battery life.

I use a Garmin Fenix 5X.

All you really need to do is pay attention to how much time you spend at your exercise of choice. No need for a tracker, and a tracker can confuse things because it combines daily activity with exercise activity. I have a gps watch I use for running. I don't sync it with mfp, I just manually log any intentional exercise I do, i.e. 45 minutes walking at 3 mph + 60 minutes running at 10 mph. I eat back those calories, but not the steps I take around the house or the grocery etc.

Not really necessary but they're fun to play with. I use one mainly to maintain a record of my running stats and will generally ignore anything else it tells me about steps, calories expended, etc.

I didn't have one throughout most of my time losing weight and didn't miss it. In fact, I think I actually had an easier time than many who leaned too much on the activity tracker. I knew exactly what I was doing because I was forced to do it manually, whereas activity trackers tend to 'hide' a lot of their logic which makes understanding and/or troubleshooting very difficult (just take a look at how many "device X says this, website says that..." threads there are on the boards).

cfredz wrote: »

NorthCascades wrote: »

If your calorie goal comes from MFP your very much supposed to eat your exercise calories. You're also supposed to try to find a reasonable estimate for what you actually burned, though.

Activity tracker are convenient but not strictly necessary. And you can use a phone app if you can stand being tethered to your phone. Hence the convenience of the smaller device with a longer battery life.

I use a Garmin Fenix 5X.

My calories are based on my TDEE - 20%, not MFP, so I am not eating back any activity calories.

Your a special case then, and for you a tracker will be less valuable than for other people.

cfredz wrote: »

Hi! Do you guys use a fitness tracker? If so, which one? I used to use a polar HRM to track all workouts and I logged them. I stopped logging my exercise as you're not supposed to eat back exercise calories. And then I had a Fitbit for a while just to track my steps during the day. Do you think it's important to log you activity? Or is it important how much you burn in a workout if you're meeting your macros/calories?

Depends on your goals! I utilize the polar , mapmyfitness, and I don't add back my calories burned, I follow IF and am focused on dropping BF% .. Hence: my goals.. fitness trackers aren't 100% correct, more like " round about" idea. So you know what your burns are , steps etc! It's mainly on what you are looking at as far as your own goals!