How do I know what to adjust to lose weight?

[vedderkris]

It's all great to track in myfitness pal, fitbit, and mapmywalk, but I wish it would tell me, hey, you need to eat less calories or burn 250 more calories or walk 2000 more steps a day so you can drop a pound.  I have all of this data and I don't know specifically what to adjust.  Am I missing something?  i wish it would give me a tip or make a suggestion based on the data I've entered.

[whome]

At the bottom of this page there is a "help" heading - under that is "fitbit online help" - on the page that clicking on that takes you to, on the right side is "website and dashboard help" - clicking there will take you to a list of articles, about 5 down the list is setting up a food plan, setting a weight goal, etc. 

That may be just the thing you are looking for. Wish I knew how to insert a link here for you, but I don't -

Hope this helps

Craig

[Mary]

Did you set up a food plan here or at MFP?  Both sites will recommend intake levels for you based on your weight and your preferred rate of loss.  It does take a little reading to make sense of them, though. 

[Heybales]

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@vedderkris wrote:

It's all great to track in myfitness pal, fitbit, and mapmywalk, but I wish it would tell me, hey, you need to eat less calories or burn 250 more calories or walk 2000 more steps a day so you can drop a pound.  I have all of this data and I don't know specifically what to adjust.  Am I missing something?  i wish it would give me a tip or make a suggestion based on the data I've entered.

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When you set up your MFP profile, it specifically asked for and recommended a 1 lb weekly weight loss goal.

Did you take that?

Then if you eat your daily goal, whether that be low because of no exercise, or higher because of exercise, you are eating less than you burn - which leads to weight loss. Hopefully only fat loss - hence the recommended 1lb weekly.

Fitbit just is a tool to sync with MFP to correct it's estimate of how much you burn, to set your eating level less than that.

Mapmywalk is just a tool to sync with MFP or Fitbit (not both) to enter in a good estimate of your exercise automatically instead of you creating an entry.

Though - with Fitbit and indeed if walking - don't worry about creating a workout by you or Mapmywalk, Fitbit has that covered with enough accuracy.

The exercise merely creates a higher daily burn, so that when you take off those 500 calories daily to lose 1 lb weekly, the eating level is still high enough to adhere to. And provides some heart health and body improvements if it's intense enough.

Since how you walk, how intense you make it, is highly variable for how much you burn, there are of course no suggestions that strong, though I sure hope you noticed the default Fitbit goals regarding steps and miles and calorie burn - they are all on your Dashboard. A goal obviously being a suggestion.

Perhaps in your search for what you thought you needed to see you missed all these things, which is doing exactly what you have asked.