Calories used and budget

[Paulioliolio]

Hi

Can someone please tell me how to stop the weight plan system adding a percentage of any extra calories I burn during the day to my budget?

I just want to have the same number of calories available to consume every day. If I use more through exercise then great, but I don't want to undo some of that work by the app telling me that I have more calories available to consume than if I hadn't done the extra. 

I really don't like the way that it undermines my progress this way, but I can't figure out how to stop it. 

Many thanks 

[SteveH]

I don't think you can change that, it's just the way the weight plan works. If you don't want fitbit to adjust your calorie allowance to take into account your activity then I'd suggest that a weight plan is not for you. A fixed amount of calories per day is not really a plan!

What I liked to do was to allow myself to eat 50% of any extra calories burned through exercise with other 50% increasing my daily deficit. I had to do this manually though as the weight plan insisted on making 100% of it available.

[Paulioliolio]

Hi Steve

I'd have to disagree there. A fixed amount of calories a day absolutely is a plan. 

Not being able to stop it from moving the goalposts all the time just means that the usefulness of the dashboard is reduced as I have to watch the total number of calories in instead of the gauge. 

It's just that I would like exercise to be a weight loss bonus rather than a food in bonus. 

It would be a ridiculously easy change to make to the system - A tick box in the settings. 

Or a slider to implement what would be more useful for you. 

In fact, we want to do the same thing, it's just that you would move the slider to 50%, and I wouldwould move it to 0%.

Over simplification seems to be a nasty trend in app design these days.

Sacrificing flexibility for a 'clean' interface. 

[SteveH]

I like the "slider" idea. Anything that provides more options is a good thing in my view, although fitbit seem to like simplicity and rarely provide options.

You might want to create a feature suggestion for the slider idea at https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Feature-Suggestions/idb-p/features

Although fitbit product development teams don't monitor these pages, they are aware of feature suggestion votes and the more votes an idea gets the more likely they are to make the change.

[gtg947h]

I'm pretty sure there's an "I want to enter my own target" option in the food plan.  I forget how to get to it because I don't use it but the function is there.

[Daveg22152]

@Paulioliolio,

If I understand you correctly, you want your food plan to reflect a set number of calories to be consumed each day.  To do that, go into the Fitbit app on your phone.  On the dashboard main display, select the account icon at the top right.  Scroll down to "Nutrition & Body", then select "Food" under the "Nutrition" heading.

You will find two choices.  Select "I want to set my own goal", and enter the number of daily calories that you want to target.  Select "Next" and you're finished.

The dashboard will now show the number of calories in and the number of calories left - the two will total your daily calorie target.  The Food Log bar chart will still reflect under, on target, or over target depending upon the time of day, but you can just ignore it.

That is what I do and I find it to be a much better approach than the Fitbit dynamic calorie tracking.  Hope that helps.

PS - if you do care about the green on-target display, the app appears to treat a calorie range of +/- 50 calories as the within-target band range.  My own goal is between 1500 and 1600 cal/day, so I chose 1550 cal as my daily goal.