Question about how to use the Inspire HR for tracking calories burned on different types of activity

[doggirl79]

Hi,

I just got my Fitbit Inspire HR about a week ago and have found it difficult to use for the main purpose of why I got it. I have a 25 year old female, weigh 112 lbs, 5 ft tall.

For the past 4 months I've been eating at what I've assumed is a fairly big calorie deficit, eating 1200-1300 calories a day.

I was in a time of losing weight and have been continuing to still lose weight even now. But now that I have lost weight I am ready to start eating more again to build muscle but felt scared to up my calories to some random amount and wanted to see how much I burn in a day to find out what I can start increasing to.

I am a fairly active person, I do something active everyday but the types of things I do varies a lot. Most of the time I either do weightlifting, bouldering, yoga, boxing, play soccer, or snowboard.

I've noticed on the days I do an activity that is cardio-centric, the fitbit will automatically know that's exercise and seem to end up thinking I burn about 1800-2000 calories in a day that includes that (which makes sense to me).

However, on a day that I lift weights or climb, which is fairly heavy and difficult respectively, I'll squat my entire weight, deadlift more than my weight, etc in an hour session and that day I will have still only burned like 1400 calories. That seems very low and means I can't even really increase my food intake by much which doesn't make much sense to me.

The other day I went climbing for 1.5 hours and was dead after and I only burned 1300 total that day. So then I tried playing around with manually entering an "exercise" in the app. I searched rock climbing and put in the 1.5 hours and it added an extra 850 calories?? That seems like too high now and also am confused by why does adding an exercise *add* calories to your calorie burn, shouldn't the fitbit have already tracked those calories? How can it be that you just add however many you *guess* you burned in an activity on top of what the fitbit is already tracking. 

Help on how I can use the fitbit for climbing and weightlifting would be appreciated, thanks! I really want to increase my food but if on days I climb it's only 1300.. then that means if I take a rest day at all it'll be lower than even that and I can't eat that little..

[Rich_Laue]

@doggirl79 I would use the multisport mode on your Inspire HR to record specific exercises as explained in page 33 of the user manual. 

I have moved your post to the manage weight  discussion board since your question really isn't about hardware. 

[doggirl79]

Thanks Rich_Laue.

That helps for adding other sports to my device. Today I did try using the weights mode on my device and actually turned it on while lifting for 1.25 hours.

And again, in total I burned 1300 calories in the day.

Is the Fitbit undercalculating my calories? I've had trainers tell me based on my height and weight I probably would burn 1800-2000 in a day that includes a normal hard workout that I do so seeing only 1300 seems confusingly small.

[Rich_Laue]

Does Fitbit have your correct height, weight, gender, etc. 

But remember Fitbit uses what they call an a stage person, and rarely anyone falls into the status of average. 

You may want to add your vote, this request needs more advertising. 

Allow users to enter a customized BMR or RMR

[Julia_G]

@doggirl79 , Fitbit is really only good at accurately tracking calories burned when you are either involved in a step based activitiy or in an activity that significantly raises your heartrate.

I would recommend on the days you do activities like weight lifting that do not fall into either category you enter log the exercise manually and enter the calories for these activities yourself based on the information your personal trainer has given you or that you estimate based on your own experience and research.