Not fit, never will be.

[Kath-mary]

Sorry, that subject line sounds awful. This is my first fitbit (Alta HR) bought yesterday. I have a heart condition, I am overweight and in my sixties and love cream cakes. That's the bad news. The good news is I want to improve; so far I've had a good nights sleep 7hr 38min, and my resting bpm 61. Trouble is my heart rate is low anyway. I've changed the 10,000 steps to 3000, because I want a realistic target to start with, believe me I've not been doing that. I've changed the calorie intake, I choose medium I think but cannot find that bit now! Anyway it's giving me 1355cals a day. Can I do anything else? Can I set it up to consider my heart condition and not assume I am wanting to be ultra fit? I've got the app on my Honor-lite but I'm also using windows 10 app on my laptop. I sound as though I know what I'm doing here, but I'm bumbling my way through. When I registered my name for the Community it suggested I post something, so here goes......

[Dominique]

Welcome to the community, @Kath-mary, and congrats for your first Fitbit and your commitment to improve your lifestyle!

Fitbit lets you choose between four intensities for your food plan: 1) easy, 2) medium, 3) kinda hard, 4) harder. The "medium" plan corresponds to a deficit of 500 calories. If you want to eat more than what Fitbit suggests, you have two possibilities: 1) move more so as to increase the total amount of calories you burn during the day, or 2) switch to the "easy" plan (which corresponds to an average daily deficit of 250 calories). You can only switch to another plan via your Dashboard (open https://www.fitbit.com in a browser on your computer), you cannot do it in the app on your mobile device.

There is no way you can instruct Fitbit to take into account your heart condition (or any other medical condition, for that matter). Fitbit determines your basal metabolic rate (BMR) using a standard equation that relies on your age, gender, height and weight. Your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE), i.e. the total amount of calories you burn during the day depends on your estimated BMR and things like your heart rate during the day, the moves of your hands and body detected by the tracker etc. Keep in mind calories burned are an estimate. If you log your intake accurately and monitor your weight on a regular basis, you will eventually know how close the estimate is to what you actually burned. The standard assumption is a cumulated deficit of 3500 calories should result in a weight loss of 1 pound.

[Baltoscott]

Welcome @Kath-mary - 

You really do sound like you know what you are doing.  Changing your step goal is a good idea.  Mostly I just tell people to ignore it for the first couple of weeks until you get a sense of how many steps fitbit counts throughout the day.  (It will count everything, not just your planned walks).  In any event, now that you know how to adjust, see how it goes for a week and then maybe try to increase your daily average by about 10%.

Getting fit is all about baby steps over time.

[Kath-mary · Accepted solution]

Thank you Baltoscott. I like the baby steps at a time bit, sort of re-generating myself.

[Kath-mary]

Thank you Dominique. I guessed I couldn't input me as a person. I'm going to keep your information and work on it, if I learn one new thing a day about fitbit, that's fine by me, like my fitness progress, it's all slowly, slowly.

[Dominique]

I second @Baltoscott’s suggestion to start by just wearing your Alta HR and establish a baseline for the main metrics tracked by Fitbit.

[emili]

@Kath-mary  welcome and congrats on your new buddy. I think the best place to start is to figure out where you are today and then decide what changes you want to make. How many calories are you eating on a normal day? Start by jotting down everything that goes in your mouth. Don't worry about the amount just the time and what it was. Then compare day over day how many steps you are taking. You will unconsciously  eat less and walk more because you are keeping track. you will notice patterns in your food intake with time and the food item. you will start to see when you are hungry or bored or feeling out of sorts. you will start to notice what part of the day you sit the longest. from there, start to plan when you will take a short walk. which food item can you do without.. then you will build out a true fitness plan keeping track of calories and weight loss. You got this!