Hitting the calorie burned target.

[SunsetRunner]

Hi all, I am loving my fitbit after a long term illness it is helping me get my fitness back. I am stuck though, I can't seem to hit the calorie target of 2431. I have smashed all my other targets I have done 6.5 miles today, over 15000 steps and I am still 100 under. How can I burn more calories walking. Walking at the moment is my only exercise option?

[SunsetRunner]

I forgot to say I have a fitbit flex

[emili]

I assume you are talking about calories burned target... I can honestly say I hit that maybe twice per week. As long as you eat less than what you burn, you should lose weight. hitting that magic number doesn't have to happen.

[hannahbebrave]

I could really use some help.  I am thinking about getting a fitbit and watched a friend tracking her calories.  She may have been doing it incorrectly but it seemed tedious and it took her a long time to get something that was innacurate.  So, how do you actually get a real number, especially if you don't eat packaged food.  When in a restaurant, I have no idea how much sugar, oil and salt they put in.  And when I cook, am I supposed to get the calories of every single ingredient?  Like, if I make a big pot of a vegetable and bean soup that has 15 ingredients and I am eating one bowl full?  And are my bowls way too big and more like 1 1/2 servings?

This seems way too time consuming.  How do you do it?

Thanks for the help.

[rissadoodlebop]

I do the same type of tracking and it is very tedious! But it's also all about doing your research and being mindful of what you put into your mouth. At restaurants (especially well known ones) I'll ask if they have a nutritional menu, you can check on the restaurants website for it as well, but it will list their entire menu and their values for you. As far as what you make yourself like the soup, you can get a ball park figure by what others have done. I use the LoseIt app in parternship with my FitBit and it has tons of food options. I'm sure if you simply searched "vegetable beef soup" it would come up with tons of options. I would pick the one that cloesly resembled my beef soup. And as far as servings and bowl sizing variations that's simple: discover what a "serving" is for that particular food item. For my beef soup a serving is 1 cup. So i take out my measuring cup and literally serve myself the cup. This can be done for anything. Hope that helps and gives you an idea - but that's how I do it and it is very tedious but I've already seen results in a little over a week! Good luck! 

[SebringDon]

@hannahbebrave

In addition to @rissadoodlebop's recommendations, there's a nice recipe calculator at the following link that I use to get the nutritional information for my wife's recipes. Then I "create a new food" in the Fitbit Food Log, using her name as the first word of the food name. That makes it easy to find her items.

http://www.caloriecount.com/cc/recipe_analysis.php

I also use a couple of tricks to keep from dirtying up a ton of measuring cups. I weighed a cup of milk and made a note of the grams, so when I add milk to my cereal I can measure the milk on the same kitchen scale I use to weigh the cereal; just hit the "tare" button after weighing your cereal and the scale will go back to zero for the next item you're adding. I use the same "tare" method when we have something like taco salad, jotting down the grams for each thing I add to my serving. Then after I eat it just takes a couple of minutes to enter the meal.

Actually, for taco salad, I used the "create a meal" option and put in a standard weight for taco chips, meat, cheese, lettuce, tomato, beans, etc. Then when I log that meal, Fitbit adds all the items to that meal with one selection, and all I have to do is adjust the amounts of each item based on the notes I made while I was making my plate.

We also have a set of cups and bowls we use most often, so I poured a cup of water into one of each and noted where the fill level is for a single cup. So if we're having soup or I'm having a glass of milk, I can measure it without dragging out a measuring cup.

Hope this helps!