Results Eating Back FitBit Calories

hey there! I sync my fitbit to myfitnesspal and have set it at 1lb to lose and sedentary... i eat some of my cals back that fitbit give me (not all) - although I do have a cheat day now and again!

I have been doing this since April and I have lost 25lbs so its working for me. And works out at roughly 1lb a week. My MFP cals is 1650 daily but I usually eat 2200 and make sure I get some exercise in or at least 15,000 steps of im not working out that day.

20K steps denotes a level of activity that is above MFPs very active setting if you consider them all as daily living activity and do not enter them as a discrete exercise.

I am hiding a few columns that do not apply to your question but assuming you log carefully, assuming you are engaged in activities your Fitbit is good at detecting, and assuming that you are one of the majority of people who tracks close to the population means... then there is little reason to totally distrust until your own logging and feedback over 4-6 weeks tells you that you should. It helps if you look at your weight as a trend (you can connect your Fitbit account to trendweight.com, or use Libra, or Happy Scale or similar)

Note that I compare my implicit TDEE derived from my food logging and actual weight change results to the Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) given by Fitbit and not to the Fitbit adjustment.

The "fitbit adjustment" you see on MFP is the mathematical difference between that Fitbit TDEE value and what MFP expected your total to be for the day. It is an accounting adjustment that does not reflect any particular exercise.

I eat back 100% of my Fitbit adjustments. Have been doing this since 2015 and my weight has behaved exactly as expected (lost weight in 2015, have been maintaining since then).

I eat some (not usually all) of my calories back if I am hungry, but leave them if I don't. It's given me room to eat according to how hungry I am!

I'd hit a month where my weight hadn't moved much when I decided to try it and was quite anxious about gaining, but actually I found that in the first few weeks I lost more weight than the previous four - Suspect that could well be because I was paying really close attention to how and what I logged though.

You can tweak Fitbit setting of stride-length if needed to improve the daily activity calorie burn.
Not everyone matches the default setting based on gender & height. Long legs, short legs, amount overweight leads to shorter strides and changes as weight lost, ect.
With that many steps, the inaccuracy in distance seen is very meaningful.
Since calories is from distance - it can matter.

Some have an issue if HR increasing enough that it slips into exercise mode and uses HR-based calorie burn - which is badly inflated at the bottom of the exercise zone.
This would apply to walking workouts that would be best calculated by distance not HR calorie burn.
Here again, if lots of those steps bumps you up into exercise mode - inflated.

But after tweaks that MFP adjustment is just the difference between your selected Activity level from 4 rough choices, and what Fitbit reported actually seeing what you do.

Even for workouts - for most people their workouts are really a small % of their weekly calories burn, even if it was inflated by 25% say.

But for your experiment - to test the burn side you gotta log great on the eat side.