Manually added exercise and my fitness pal

[Mcierley]

Hello, I am a brand new Fitbit user. I just set it up on 12/26/16 and I'm very confused by a few things. First, I understand that Fitbit uses you BMR to calculate calories burned. What I don't understand is if that's all that it is counting. I have a fairly active job and it counts my steps, but not the other activity, so I'm wondering if this is an accurate picture of the calories I'm really burning. I've searched the internet for answers but couldn't find anything that really answered my question.

I also have noticed that when I add exercise manually my calories count doesn't change. I'm wondering why this is. 

I also recently linked it my fitness pal and can't seem to figure out the benefits of this. Can someone please tell me if this is a good thing to do or not?

Thank you so much for your help 🙂

M

[SteveH · Accepted solution]

Welcome to fitbit! Don't worry about being confused - we all go through that and it does take time to get up to speed. Stick with it!

Your BMR calories are burned at a constant rate, day and night, and you burn extra calories based on fitbit's assessment of your activity - which is down to its interpretation of your tracker's movement plus any calories from manually logged activities.

So, to answer your first question: yes, your calories burned should be fairly accurate.

When you manually add an activity and you were wearing your fitbit then it overwrites the calories that were tracked by your fitbit with those calculated for the manual entry. If they were about the same then you wouldn't see much change. If it always just added the calories for a manual entry then you would end up double counting.

I use MyFitnesPal alongside fitbit as I find the food database much better for me in the UK. I log all my food into MyFitnessPal and all my activity into Fitbit and the two sync together. If the food database is ok for you (or you don't log food) then it's probably easier (and simpler) to just use Fitbit.

[Mcierley]

Thank you Steve! That helps a lot!

[Aine25]

Hi there,

How do you get fitness pal (mpf) and fitbit to sync? I logged food in both android apps but one never over wrote the other and my exercise didn't show up in mfp. They both say they are linked but the data from either one doesn't show up in the other app. 

[Fuchigirl]

When I sync myfitnesspal and fitbit it indicated to log my exercise in the myfitnesspal app. However when I do so, myfitnesspal automatically has pre determined calories burned depending on the exercise.  How do I locate the actual calories burned determined by the fitbit after I track a workout and how do those calories burned get recorded?

[o0TheJacqie0o]

I have a similar question. I had a Garmin vivismart HR but it ended yo being a lemon so I got a charge 2 HR as recommended.  I have it all synced, but I preferred the way Garmin connect synced. It didn't necessarily count the steps, unless you preferred for it to. There's a setting I'm MFP to allow step data or not. With fitbit, I find it adds calories to MFP for activities and steps alike, all under "steps." Is there a way to change this setting? I want my activity AMD the calories burned to be synced to MFP from fitbit, but I don't want extra calories burned added based on steps and projections. If I can't figure this out, I might go back to Garmin! 

[AnnieRae]

I am of no help, but I have the same exact question!

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I want my activity AMD the calories burned to be synced to MFP from fitbit, but I don't want extra calories burned added based on steps and projections. If I can't figure this out, I might go back to Garmin!