Calories: MFP and Fitbit?

[Bookgoddess75]

My fitbit charge 2 is connected with My Fitness Pal. When  I enter items in to my MFP food diary, the app calculates how many calories I have remaining for the day. Although the calories sometimes go over, it adjusts for exercise and calories burned, and so I’ve always been under my calories; however, on the Fitbit app, it keep showing that I am over my calories, because  technically I have consumed more calories than my goal. Is Fitbit just not considering calories burned? Which one should I follow, MFP or Fitbit? 

[WavyDavey]

Hi @Bookgoddess75,

As far as I know, they both use calories burned. I think the difference may be, on the Fitbit end, you have a weight plan with a calorie deficit defined, which is taken into account on Fitbit.

Are you logging exercise within Fitbit? Does it show up in the activity log in the dashboard?

[Bookgoddess75]

Yes Fitbit is logging exercise. It’s just that MFP gives me “credit” calories for exercise and fitbit does not... fitbit counts calories in, period. I have been trying to keep to that and it works much better for weight loss! 😋

thank you

[WavyDavey]

That sounds odd. All exercises I do that show up in the activity list are automatically taken into account as calories burned on the Fitbit side of things.

Hopefully someone who's more knowledgeable about how MFP works with Fitbit will be able to answer.

[SunsetRunner]

MFP uses the NEAT method for determining your calories in goal. It asks you for an activity level excluding conscious exercise and then determines your calorie goal based on how much weight you said you wanted to lose per week.  You then can enter your exercise manually and it will increase your calories in accordingly so that you effectively "eat back" your exercise calories until you reach a calories in that matches your set deficit.  Some people don't like this because they feel that it is a 'waste' of their exercise, especially if they are straight out just wanting to get to a particular weight.  Some people like this because they are concerned about fitness and want to fuel their workouts and can eat more. There are also problems with figuring out how much you actually burned with your exercise.

If you sync your FitBit with MFP you have to careful of a couple things:

If you enter conscious/deliberate exercise into MFP you are effectively double dipping your cals burnt.

Your totals in MFP for calories you can have left will be a moving target because it is trying to estimate your cals burnt for the day based on your Fitbit  and your day isn't over yet. You could be more or less active for the rest of the day.

I have my Fitbit synced with MFP becauseI prefer the MFP food database and food tracking system so how I manage it is, I use the Fitbit site for logging exercise and my total calories burned and log my food in MFP and use MFP for my total calories in and out for the day.