Do you eat what you earn from Fitbit?

Goldensun2014
Goldensun2014 Posts: 51 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
Just curious it seems like I’m getting a ton of extra exercise calories from my Fitbit being synced. Do you eat them? How do you know you accurately burned that much?

Replies

  • snarlingcoyote
    snarlingcoyote Posts: 399 Member
    edited January 2018
    As far as I can tell, MFP severely over estimates the calories I earn from my steps unless I am hiking in steep hills with a pack, in which case MFP severely under estimates my calorie burn.

    However, for at least the past quarter century, all the various weight loss methods I've tried have tied exercise to extra food, with the result that this is now my default. Soooo. . . I set my base calories in MFP at something like 700, knowing full well MFP will say I've earned 900 calories for the day from walking.

    Yes, truthfully, I'm playing games with myself. I could turn off the link, set my base calories in MFP for a reasonable weight loss, then go in and manually add a reasonable number of calories for my steps each day.

    But then I wouldn't get the thrill of seeing that ridiculous number appear for calories earned through exercise.

    YMMV and, in this case, probably does. :smiley:
  • kimny72
    kimny72 Posts: 16,011 Member
    edited January 2018
    Yes, you are supposed to eat back your exercise calories (the calorie goal you get from MFP assumes you will).

    But also yes, it can be really difficult to get an accurate count of how many calories you are really burning.

    I took a peek and I see you were given 1000 exercise calories today. If that is the typical adjustment you get, it does seem inflated, what kind of exercise are you doing? Make sure you have the same activity level and stats in both MFP and Fitbit, if they don't match it can mess with your adjustment.

    The general wisdom is to start by eating back half and see how it goes. If you are hungry and losing weight faster than expected after a couple of weeks, eat back more.
  • CyberTone
    CyberTone Posts: 7,337 Member
    ​I generally eat back 100% of the Fitbit Calorie adjustment in maintenance. I ate back about 90% of them when I was losing a few pounds and had no problem netting about 1600 Cals per day to lose those pounds when I had MFP set to lose 0.5 pounds per week.

    For comparison, I am 56, 5'8", 150 lbs. and my maintenance net Calories are about 1860 at MFP Sedentary. I normally gross 2300 Calories logged for food and earn on average about a 500 Fitbit Calorie adjustment above MFP Sedentary activity level setting.

    I do use a food scale to weigh all solids, measuring cups and spoons to measure liquids, and verify all food items I log through outside web sources and Nutrition Facts labels. I trust that my Calorie Intake is pretty accurate using MFP, and I trust my Calorie Output is pretty accurate using the Fitbit Charge 2.

    I would recommend reading through the first three posts in this thread on the MFP Fitbit Users group...

    http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10098937/faq-syncing-logging-food-exercise-calorie-adjustments-activity-levels-accuracy

    http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/group/1290-fitbit-users​
  • shadow2soul
    shadow2soul Posts: 7,692 Member
    Yes. I eat them.
    I carefully tracked for several months what I found:

    Zip/Flex - underestimate my TDEE by an avg of 250 calories a day
    This translated to me losing faster than planned and faster than what would have been predicted by the difference between Fitbit burn and calories in.

    Surge/Blaze - Seem to be about right. I'm losing, gaining, or maintaining as predicted by my the difference between my Fitbit burn and calories in.

    So yes I eat all the calories I get on MFP from my Fitbit. At the end of the day both Fitbit and MFP agree on how much I need to eat for the deficit I selected.

    If you are getting a large Fitbit adjustment than you likely have your activity level set to low. I have mine set to Sedentary, but currently get 11k plus steps and as such expect a large adjustment. When I first started using Fitbit with MFP, I was so inactive I would get a negative adjustment while MFP was set to Sedentary.
  • shadow2soul
    shadow2soul Posts: 7,692 Member
    Just ran my Fitbit Burn compared to intake for the past 10 days (that's as long as I have been properly tracking currently):

    10 Day Avg Fitbit Blaze burn: 2852*
    10 Day Avg Calories In: 2133
    10 Day Deficit: 7190
    Expected loss: 2.05 lbs
    Actual loss: 3.6 lbs

    Now I expect these being the first 10 days back to tracking that a chunk of that loss is water.

    *Total Fitbit Calorie Burn....This is not my MFP adjustment.
  • CMS_3049
    CMS_3049 Posts: 20 Member
    I maintained my weight eating about 100-200 less than my FitBit Charge HR says burn until I broke my hand. Then I ate because I was bored. But yes, I find it somewhat accurate but err on the side of caution.

    I have MFP set to sedentary and see adjustments of around 600-1200 depending on my day. But I always hit 15K, with additional bike riding. Some of those steps is running as well.
  • firef1y72
    firef1y72 Posts: 1,579 Member
    I most definitely eat mine and have lost 142lb doing so. If I didn't eat them then I would be seriously underfuelling my body (I can earn anything up to 2000+ Calories through exercise especially now as I'm marathon training).
  • leahraskie
    leahraskie Posts: 260 Member
    Depends what you're doing, if you don't think you burned many calories that day I would ignore the extra calories added. If you worked out a lot, I'd eat some of them back. I think I ate about 50% back when I was working out.

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