Fitbit Calorie "Gauge"

[PRTony89]

I just bought my Fibit last week and am paying attention to the web client daily. Every day my "calorie gauge" is in the yellow (to the far left) as if I am not eating enough. According to Myfitnesspal, I am eating perfectly as far as calories in/calories out are concerned. Of course, this doesn't account for all the calorie burn my fit does since it tracks calories burned all day.

I have two questions -

1) How accurate is the "gauge" with Fitbit and should I consider eating more to help with weight loss?

2) If I am currently losing weight and I am not hungry all day, should I disregard this?

Thank you for any input!

[EmjayH · Accepted solution]

I find myfitnesspal to be more accurate for me. Fitbit seems to over assess my calorie expenditure by about 15%

[alcarcalimo2364]

Fitbit does tend to overestimate. I would say trust your body. If you aren't hungry and still losing weight, stick to what you're doing. You can also try using a free account trendweight.com which will tell you how much you are burning on average vs what you are eating, and can allow you to gauge how much fitbit is overestimating your calorie burn. It can connect to your Fitbit Aria if you have one so you don't even have to enter the weight.

[PRTony89]

I think I will give this a try. I'm typically pretty full most days, but I do not want to overeat those days that I am starving. I just started a full body workout 3 days a week with 20 minutes of HIIT following the lifting and am doing some kind of "outdoorsy" activity such as trail running/walking, kayaking etc so my hunger levels are constantly fluctuating.

[IMchika]

I'd been pondering this quite a bit myself.  I think the "gauges" are off - and while I prefer the recommendations from My Fitness Pal (or Fat Secret) - I like having all my information in one place with the fitbit.  So I'm trying to go based on what I believe is my recommended calorie count, and not based on how fitbit interprets those calories to fit with my expended calories.

Good luck 🙂

[UVcat]

I found the "gauge" completely useless when I was tracking my calories in order to lose weight, even though I did find that my fitbit (I had a Flex at the time -- no HR monitor) estimated the total number of calories I was burning pretty accurately.

My issue with the "gauge" was that I eat a small breakfast and a small lunch, and then a large dinner. So, all day the gauge would tell me I was way under calories, and then after dinner it would tell me I was way over. I can't see how this feature would be accurate for anyone unless they were a "grazer" who ate continuously throughout the day.

I found it *much* more useful to look at the "food plan" tile, which projected how many more calories I could eat for the day, using my RMR, my activity so far, my calories consumed so far, and my desired deficit. (With the caveat that this was only helpful when I changed my Food Plan setting to "sedentary" so that it wouldn't try to predict how active I would be for the rest of the day.)

I have noticed a lot of folks saying that their HR-enabled fitbits over-estimate their calories burned, but my non-HR one was correct (the rate at which I actually lost weight matched the deficit fitbit estimated I had). The fact that the "Calories In/Out Gauge" was unhelpful was a separate issue.

-UVc