Customising my BMR and/or target calorie intake to account for fast metabolism

[d_baker]

I understand that fitbit automatically calculates your BMR based on the profile information you give it. However, I have always known my metabolism is faster than average for my demographic. Using my fitbit has confirmed this as it's telling me my calories are over target when they're not. I'm a healthy weight, I've always needed to eat a lot and I never put on any weight no matter what I eat.

I'm not looking to gain or lose weight, I just want to make sure that I'm eating enough because I have a high stress/high mental focus job that takes a lot of energy and I'm still adjusting to the additional calorie intake I require as a result.

I want to be able to log my calories each day, compare the numbers to how much energy I have on that day and work out for myself what my ideal intake is, then tell fitbit that's my target. But there doesn't seem to be a way to do that. Even being able to change my BMR to a custom value would be better than nothing.

Should I just edit my profile to lie about my age/weight/gender so it gives me targets that are closer to my actual metabolism? Can you even do that after you've set it up?

[WavyDavey]

Hi @d_baker ,

The only way I know how is, as you noted, to change the profile information. However, this will have an effect on other aspects of Fitbit that use that information, such as Cardio Fitness. But if calories in/out is your main focus, that may be OK.

I'm in the same situation, and honestly I just found it easier by using the scale, to find I needed about 250 extra calories to maintain weight. You can even program it to think you want to gain weight, and then set the calorie surplus to whatever number you need to maintain.

Basically, it takes some experimentation.

[d_baker]

So I tried changing some of the settings in my profile... changing my weight and height seemed to make no difference but changing my gender from female to male made my calorie target more in line with my actual needs, so I guess I'll stick with that and see how it goes!

As you mentioned, it does change the cardio fitness scale but doesn't seem to have had any effect on other stats, as far as I can see.

I've noticed there's now an inconsistency in the stats. The graph shows my intake since I started logging (last 2 days) as consistently Under, but the list of stats under "This week" at the bottom of the screen shows yesterday (Friday) as Over and the day before as Under, even though in both cases I ate less than I burned according to the new algorithm:

If I tap on the over-target row, it looks like this:

The Thursday entry doesn't have that "1853 calorie goal" bit. I'm not sure if this is just because I was playing around with food plans (which I've now deleted). If so, it's weird that it would continue to calculate the stats for just that one entry as if I still have a food plan. Any ideas?

P.S. Just noticed that today's stats have a "daily calorie goal" too, except it's now 1907 instead of 1853. I really do not know where this number is coming from.