Slightly Confused...

[miester888]

Hey guys! 

Got a FitBit Blaze two weeks ago, and I've been loving it so far. Down 11 pounds total, counting my steps and calories. I'm slightly tripped up on something though, and wondering if you can help me.

Say I'm working on a calorie deficit of 1000 perday, and my TDEE is 2500. But then I exercise some more, and my total burned calories for the day goes up to 3100. Does that mean I have to eat 2100 calories? Because if I was doing the 1500 calories per day, that then becomes a 1600 deficit, which is too much. 

Thanks!

[WendyB]

Welcome to the forums! Congrats on your loss so far!

Glad you like your Blaze!

[JohnRi]

There are two settings on at the Fitbit.com website where you can set how you want your tracker to show how many calories you have left to eat.  Sedentary and Personalize.

By default the setting is set to Sedentary.  With this setting your app will show you an estimate of how many calories you have left to eat based on your activity level.  So at 5:00 PM it can show you need 1500 calories, and then you exercise, burn 600 calories, and now you need to eat 2100 calories.

If you exercise every day, and you roughly burn 3100 calories a day, then you might want to change the setting Personalize.

Personalize looks at how many calories you typically burn in a day, and tells you how many calories you need to eat that day.  HOWEVER it can be very wrong.  If you exercise every day, so the next day it will tell you to eat 2100 calories.  But if you do not exercise that day, you will easily over eat.  Because it's basing it's estimate on you exercising.

Toi change the setting go to fitbit.com, and the log tab, under Food, there is Gear with a drop down under Food Plan.

Since I exercise almost every day, I have mine set to personalize.  I used to have it set to sedentary, but like you I would have to suddenly eat a bunch of calories after exercise to stay close to my deficit.  On the days I don't exercise, I scale back how much I eat.

I hope this helps... 

Personally your tracker is probably over estimating how many calories you burn, and the number of calories you eat is probably a little more than what you have logged.

I used to eat a healthy snack at night to raise my calories burned to around 200-250 of my goal.  So in theory I was eating around 1200 to 1100 fewer calories a day.  Now with set to personalize, I eat more during the day, and I don't have to catch up at night.  But like I said, if I know I'm not going to exercise, then I scale back my diet during the day.  Otherwise, I'm over my deficit.

[emili]

its actually up to you and how you feel. If you want to eat back those calories go ahead. If you feel good, not tired, not shaky, not brain cloudy or starving then eat back some or none. Yes, you will get folks who will say you will be losing too fast, etc etc etc. But its really all estimates both calories in and out, so go by how you feel and the data your scale gives you based on what you did or didn't do. You can always do something different the next day..

[Flatermuis]

Kind of depends. To prevent my body from using my muscles to use as energy source i usually ate more protien as i burned more, but i generally try and eat about 80% of my burned cal. Health wise the deficit whouldn't be a problem, so it's your call. If you don't get hungry, headaches, tired or moody, your body can handle it.