Advice needed
Viktorija34
Posts: 41 Member
Please see above screenshot of my food and exercise. Would you eat the remaining 1000 calories or stick to 1700 calories?
What are your thoughts?
1
Replies
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Eat the 1000 calories. MFP is set up so you eat back your exercise calories.3
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Thank you!0
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eat them back, but make sure those exercise calories aren't over estimated, which many are... If you are not sure, eat back 1/2 of the calories and track it for a few weeks to see if it meets your goals, then adjust as needed.10
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It depends on your goals. I'm trying to lose weight so I don't include exercise calories in my daily caloric goal.1
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nighthawk584 wrote: »eat them back, but make sure those exercise calories aren't over estimated, which many are... If you are not sure, eat back 1/2 of the calories and track it for a few weeks to see if it meets your goals, then adjust as needed.
That^^6 -
fdlewenstein wrote: »It depends on your goals. I'm trying to lose weight so I don't include exercise calories in my daily caloric goal.
That's not how this site is set up to work. It expects you to eat back any exercise calories. The daily goal it gives you will create weight loss, without exercise.
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fdlewenstein wrote: »It depends on your goals. I'm trying to lose weight so I don't include exercise calories in my daily caloric goal.
Even if you're trying to lose weight, MFP is designed for you to eat back additional calories burnt through exercise.13 -
Thank you all for your advice, it makes sense!8
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eat back half the calories and see how you feel. If you aren't hungry after eating back half then you probably don;t need anymore. I think the exercise estimate tends to be on the high side (for me anyways) so eating back some is safe... but I'd be careful about eating them allllll back.3
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Thank you, I understand!1
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First of all this is a Fitbit adjustment and it is quite early in the day before 4 p.m. which means that 33% of the day remains.
Unless your extra level of activity continues this adjustment will decrease later in the day.
And the answer depends on your settings on mfp to a large extent and the accuracy of your food intake logging too
Are you set up as sedentary in to lose 2 pounds a week? Are you set up as very active and to lose a half a pound a week? How many pounds do you have available to lose? Are these steps throughout the day or deliberate exercise? Walking indoors or hiking up a hill? Is your Fitbit an HR model and your heart rate relatively high or a non HR model?
Cutting to the chase. My quick estimate is that you rack in about 10,000 steps a day. I would quickly look up "active" on mfp, and ensure that I'm eating around that much until I had individualize results that would allow me to better evaluate how accurately my purported deficits track reality
this is based on the following internal assumptions:
You're set up as sedentary on mfp
You will not be engaging in a significant number of activity between 4 p.m. and midnight
You're in this for the long term so you can afford to lose a little bit more or a little bit less as long as you're heading in the right direction.
After a few weeks (four to six weeks for women subject to monthly hormonal water retention, 3 weeks or so otherwise) I would compare my purported deficits to my weight trend from trendweight.com or similar and establish a logging error that would allow me to more confidently eat all the "exercise" Calories I could lay into while still meeting my weight loss goals6 -
I'd be curious what othe Fitbit users say, but I think with a Fitbit adjustment that you can safely eat more than 50%. For me, it is close to 100%.
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First of all this is a Fitbit adjustment and it is quite early in the day before 4 p.m. which means that 33% of the day remains.
Unless your extra level of activity continues this adjustment will decrease later in the day.
And the answer depends on your settings on mfp to a large extent and the accuracy of your food intake logging too
Are you set up as sedentary in to lose 2 pounds a week? Are you set up as very active and to lose a half a pound a week? How many pounds do you have available to lose? Are these steps throughout the day or deliberate exercise? Walking indoors or hiking up a hill? Is your Fitbit an HR model and your heart rate relatively high or a non HR model?
Cutting to the chase. My quick estimate is that you rack in about 10,000 steps a day. I would quickly look up "active" on mfp, and ensure that I'm eating around that much until I had individualize results that would allow me to better evaluate how accurately my purported deficits track reality
this is based on the following internal assumptions:
You're set up as sedentary on mfp
You will not be engaging in a significant number of activity between 4 p.m. and midnight
You're in this for the long term so you can afford to lose a little bit more or a little bit less as long as you're heading in the right direction.
After a few weeks (four to six weeks for women subject to monthly hormonal water retention, 3 weeks or so otherwise) I would compare my purported deficits to my weight trend from trendweight.com or similar and establish a logging error that would allow me to more confidently eat all the "exercise" Calories I could lay into while still meeting my weight loss goals
Hi, thank you for this. My Fitbit counts all my steps so yes, I do tend to walk between 8000 and 10000 steps a day. In the gym today, I did 20 min of fast walking so I didn't add this as exercise because Fitbit is measuring my steps already. I've added only rowing machine and bicycle. I went to the gym today quite early around 2pm, normally I go around 7:30pm. My settings are set up as lightly active and I have a desk job. Do you think I should adjust it as active??0 -
Hi, thank you for this. My Fitbit counts all my steps so yes, I do tend to walk between 8000 and 10000 steps a day. In the gym today, I did 20 min of fast walking so I didn't add this as exercise because Fitbit is measuring my steps already. I've added only rowing machine and bicycle. I went to the gym today quite early around 2pm, normally I go around 7:30pm. My settings are set up as lightly active and I have a desk job. Do you think I should adjust it as active??0
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You're getting a positive adjustment.
This means that your Fitbit is detecting more than your current activity on mfp
When you enter exercise manually you're overriding whatever was detected automatically.
If you're very overweight and your heart rate is relatively high there is a higher chance that some of the calories Fitbit thinks you spent didn't really happen.
10K steps is about the midpoint of active.
If you're doing additional exercise to that, that would have to be accounted too.
I will caution you that when you stop being active there will be a reduction of these calories because of how integration works. Fitbit is giving you one x BMR Calories per minute of non-detection to midnight. MFP is giving you 1.25, 1.4, 1.6, 1.8 x BMR calories per minute to midnight.
If you stopped activity at 4 p.m. as lightly active, you would lose 480 minutes of 0.4x BMR calories out of that adjustment by midnight.
My Fitbit whole day "error" when I was logging carefully never exceeded 4% when looked at over several months. So, for example, out of 3000 TDEE 2900 would be edible. And that was at the end of weight loss. First year was less than half a percent error.
But this experience is not necessarily Universal so in the end only your own data can tell you how accurate things are.
I've generally avoided logging activity on mfp, and at best I would start the exercise activity directly on Fitbit making sure and or adjusting the start and stop times.
If you're hungry by all means do remember that long-term compliance is the name of the game. Going nowhere (due to giving up or non-compliance) at 2 pounds a week does not beat dropping 50 pounds at 1 pound a week!
I generally advocate eating most of your Fitbit adjustments because they're generally relatively accurate.
But the early time and my concern whether an elevated heart rate and manual exercise logging on mfp is giving you extra calories that may not truly be there make me somewhat cautious
Which is why I'm presenting to you the sanity checks of active and very active.
Your steps by themselves qualify you at a caloric level commensurate to MFP's active in most cases.
If you have another 30-plus minutes of activity and exercise on top then that probably puts you up to very active... purely as Caloric values.
You can use this as a double check while you determine how accurately your logging and Fitbit are predicting your weight trend change over the next few weeks (each pound of change should correspond to about 3500 Cal)
All the methods presented above by others will also work as long as you're willing to actively manage the process and make changes based on how things are actually working for you
3 -
You're getting a positive adjustment.
This means that your Fitbit is detecting more than your current activity on mfp
When you enter exercise manually you're overriding whatever was detected automatically.
If you're very overweight and your heart rate is relatively high there is a higher chance that some of the calories Fitbit thinks you spent didn't really happen.
10K steps is about the midpoint of active.
If you're doing additional exercise to that, that would have to be accounted too.
I will caution you that when you stop being active there will be a reduction of these calories because of how integration works. Fitbit is giving you one x BMR Calories per minute of non-detection to midnight. MFP is giving you 1.25, 1.4, 1.6, 1.8 x BMR calories per minute to midnight.
If you stopped activity at 4 p.m. as lightly active, you would lose 480 minutes of 0.4x BMR calories out of that adjustment by midnight.
My Fitbit whole day "error" when I was logging carefully never exceeded 4% when looked at over several months. So, for example, out of 3000 TDEE 2900 would be edible. And that was at the end of weight loss. First year was less than half a percent error.
But this experience is not necessarily Universal so in the end only your own data can tell you how accurate things are.
I've generally avoided logging activity on mfp, and at best I would start the exercise activity directly on Fitbit making sure and or adjusting the start and stop times.
If you're hungry by all means do remember that long-term compliance is the name of the game. Going nowhere (due to giving up or non-compliance) at 2 pounds a week does not beat dropping 50 pounds at 1 pound a week!
I generally advocate eating most of your Fitbit adjustments because they're generally relatively accurate.
But the early time and my concern whether an elevated heart rate and manual exercise logging on mfp is giving you extra calories that may not truly be there make me somewhat cautious
Which is why I'm presenting to you the sanity checks of active and very active.
Your steps by themselves qualify you at a caloric level commensurate to MFP's active in most cases.
If you have another 30-plus minutes of activity and exercise on top then that probably puts you up to very active... purely as Caloric values.
You can use this as a double check while you determine how accurately your logging and Fitbit are predicting your weight trend change over the next few weeks (each pound of change should correspond to about 3500 Cal)
All the methods presented above by others will also work as long as you're willing to actively manage the process and make changes based on how things are actually working for you
Thank you for this again. It is very useful! I do think that mfp app gives me too many calories to eat because of Fitbit. I am at early stage of losing weight so don't know if the calories are accurate and I'm afraid to eat it all because I think I'll gain more weight. And I'm already overweight enough!
I am considering disconnecting Fitbit from mfp and logging my exercise manually. What do you think?1 -
That you should keep it connected.
And you should evaluate your logging results vs your weight trend results after 4-6 weeks that include a complete monthly hormonal cycle since people often tend to retain water weight because of those.
Myself and a bunch of other people have had no problem eating most if not all our Fitbit calories.
There are a couple of specific issues that I highlighted that concerned me about you specifically eating back all of the calories in question as per your original post. Starting from the fact that on an estimation about 270 of them will go away by midnight due to the way the math calculates (assumption: you're set to 2lbs a week and your BMR is over 1900)
This doesn't make a consistent third party estimator of your caloric expenditure a bad idea. Or make you manually counting them more accurate over the long term. It just means that in the SHORT term you should proceed cautiously, that's all.
Being in it for the long term does mean making things as easy as possible for you. As easy as possible and as sustainable. Having an automatic estimation that you know how much to trust is an excellent tool.
Your weight loss is not going to be decided in a week
You just want to slowly build building blocks of long term behaviours and tools that will help you and keep on helping you!
As I said earlier, while technically incorrect as an advice (eat half and re-evaluate), it will work just as well as anything. If you're hungry and based on your descriptions, I would eat up to the MFP very active level of calories remembering that making things easy enough that you keep going week after week is more valuable than losing an extra lb and making things too difficult!
Also do remember that daily weight is not the same as weight trend. Weight TREND is what you're after to get you to where you want to be. daily weight can move around much more and is more related to water weight (catch-all for non fat related weight).5 -
That you should keep it connected.
And you should evaluate your logging results vs your weight trend results after 4-6 weeks that include a complete monthly hormonal cycle since people often tend to retain water weight because of those.
Myself and a bunch of other people have had no problem eating most if not all our Fitbit calories.
There are a couple of specific issues that I highlighted that concerned me about you specifically eating back all of the calories in question as per your original post. Starting from the fact that on an estimation about 270 of them will go away by midnight due to the way the math calculates (assumption: you're set to 2lbs a week and your BMR is over 1900)
This doesn't make a consistent third party estimator of your caloric expenditure a bad idea. Or make you manually counting them more accurate over the long term. It just means that in the SHORT term you should proceed cautiously, that's all.
Being in it for the long term does mean making things as easy as possible for you. As easy as possible and as sustainable. Having an automatic estimation that you know how much to trust is an excellent tool.
Your weight loss is not going to be decided in a week You just want to slowly build building blocks of long term behaviours and tools that will help you and keep on helping you!
As I said earlier, while technically incorrect as an advice (eat half and re-evaluate), it will work just as well as anything. If you're hungry and based on your descriptions, I would eat up to the MFP very active level of calories remembering that making things easy enough that you keep going week after week is more valuable than losing an extra lb and making things too difficult!
Also do remember that daily weight is not the same as weight trend. Weight TREND is what you're after to get you to where you want to be. daily weight can move around much more and is more related to water weight (catch-all for non fat related weight).
Thank you so much! It all makes a lot of sense. Thank you for taking time to write to me regarding this, I really do appreciate that. Thank you!6 -
Last thing because it is NOT clear and it is something that people often struggle with early on.
Your MFP goal INCLUDES a deficit such that you will LOSE weight at the rate selected over a period of time assuming your track relatively accurately and you're not a statistical outlier.
It is a DEFICIT goal. Going over your deficit goal or even your maintenance goal one day does NOT mean you will GAIN weight. Going over your deficit goal consistently does mean that you might not lose as much weight as your deficit goal would have you losing, of course, but this is splitting hairs in terms of the overall weight loss. (and yes, going over your maintenance goal consistently... let's not go there!)
Looking back at things on January 17, 2020, do you think it really made a big difference to my success whether on January 17 of 2015 with a base goal of a scant 1540 Calories (which i thankfully increased soon after) it really matters that because of a negative adjustment from Fitbit due to being relatively inactive that day, I ended up eating 1355 Calories over goal when I consumed a total of 2567 Calories? On the other hand, believe me when I say that what happened between November of 2014 and November of 2015, a time frame during which I took in an average of 2560 Cal a day WHILE CREATING an average deficit of 695 Cal a day, DEFINITELY did matter--to the tune of 72.5lbs.
3 -
Last thing because it is NOT clear and it is something that people often struggle with early on.
Your MFP goal INCLUDES a deficit such that you will LOSE weight at the rate selected over a period of time assuming your track relatively accurately and you're not a statistical outlier.
It is a DEFICIT goal. Going over your deficit goal or even your maintenance goal one day does NOT mean you will GAIN weight. Going over your deficit goal consistently does mean that you might not lose as much weight as your deficit goal would have you losing, of course, but this is splitting hairs in terms of the overall weight loss. (and yes, going over your maintenance goal consistently... let's not go there!)
Looking back at things on January 17, 2020, do you think it really made a big difference to my success whether on January 17 of 2015 with a base goal of a scant 1540 Calories (which i thankfully increased soon after) it really matters that because of a negative adjustment from Fitbit due to being relatively inactive that day, I ended up eating 1355 Calories over goal when I consumed a total of 2567 Calories? On the other hand, believe me when I say that what happened between November of 2014 and November of 2015, a time frame during which I took in an average of 2560 Cal a day WHILE CREATING an average deficit of 695 Cal a day, DEFINITELY did matter--to the tune of 72.5lbs.
That is very inspiring! Great job and thank you for sharing. I will try my best to succeed this time.1
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