Exercises are not syncing to Myfitnesspal, steps are

[Gravage]

I have been using Garmin and just switched back to a Fitbit. My Garmin syncs exercises fine, but the exercises logged in my Fitbit are not syncing at all. Steps from my Fitbit do sync. I have disconnected and reconnected the services several times on both the websites and the apps.

[Anve · Accepted solution]

The syncing between MyFitnessPal and Fitbit works a bit different than what you are probably used to. Individual exercises from Fitbit are not synced as individual seperate exercises in MFP. Instead, your workout will be reflected in your calories burned under the step counter.

This is so that your workouts and calorie burn can take MFP's activity level into account. If you have selected an 'active' lifestyle, MFP automatically adds calorie allowance to your intake. This is to offset the calories you already burn from your active lifestyle, without having to log an exercise. When fitbit tells MFP a more accurate calorie burned total and your new burned amount is not yet past your activity level threshold, MFP will not add any allowed calorie intake, not even from exercise.

Excercises are not added to MFP as a seperate activity. Instead, the extra burned calories are added to the total fitbit stepcounter under excercise. To get the best results, go to the MFP website and under your diary setting, tick the "allow negative adjustments" box. This will allow MFP to give negative exercise calories if you have not met your MFP activity level yet.

Also keep in mind that you should not manually add exercises to MFP manually if you tracked them using Fitbit. If you do, they would be added twice. Once under the stepcounter, and under the manually logged exercise in MFP.

Hope this helps. 

Edit: here's a calculation as an example:

Example 1: Your MBR is 1900 calories. Your acivity level on MFP is set te 'active lifestyle' and you want to reduce daily intake by 500 calories. You are now allowed to consume 2400 calories on MFP. (1900 MBR + 1000 activity level - 500 restriction). MFP excpects you to burn 1000 calories from your active lifestyle. Now, let's say it's the end of day. Your fitbit app says you burned 300 calories from walking around (using the step counter). You also went on a run that morning and tracked it using fitbit. During the run, you burned 400 calories. This makes your total burn rate for exercise as follows: 300 step counter + 400 morning run = 700 kcal. Since this is a lower burn than the 1000 kcal MFP excpects, fitbits adds 0 bonus calories for exercise (or -300 if you enabled that setting on the website like I mentioned).

Example 2: Your MBR is 1850 calories. Your activity level on MFP is set te 'sedentary lifestyle' and you want to reduce daily intake by 500 calories. You are now allowed to consume 1350 calories on MFP. (1900 MBR + 0 activity level - 500 restriction). MFP excpects you to burn 0 calories from your sedentary lifestyle. Now, let's say it's the end of the day. Your fitbit app says you burned 100 calories from walking around (using the step counter). You also went on a run that morning and tracked it using fitbit. During the run, you burned 300 calories. This makes your total burn rate for exercise as follows: 100 step counter + 300 morning run = 400 kcal. Since this is a higher burn than the 0 kcal MFP excpects, fitbits adds 400 bonus calories for exercise.

[Gravage]

Has it always been this way? I used to use Fitbit, but switched to Garmin
for a long time. The Garmin syncs my individual exercises and step count
separately to MFP. I swore Fitbit used to do that, but perhaps I simply
don't remember.

Thanks for the response. This actually explains a lot.

--
*Will*

[Anve]

I have no idea how it used to be. I did notice from personal experience that this is how it works now. I also added some calculations to my original post in case it was still unclear.

Please consider marking my response as a solution if this solves your problem so other people can find it more easily! 🙂

[Gravage]

Look at it again, it seems you might be right. I like the way Garmin does it better, but I suppose they achieve the same result. What's odd is that Lose It! does show individual exercises from Fitbit.

[Anve]

I'm not sure how well they communicate the functionalities of these services between companies...

It might fully be possible that fitbit just sends syncdata to MFP, and how MFP presents that data to their users is out of their hands. Which is why loseit presents the data in a different manner. But that is just an educated guess.

[RobertoME]

Hi there @Gravage, welcome to our Community and good to see you @Anve.

What a great post you have shared @Anve. Very informative; from a user perspective I think its a great addition to our Community. As you mentioned before I'm sure it will be very useful for other people who might having the same query.

@Gravage note that each integration works differently, due to this is not from our ends. The developed of the integrations come from the third party service who use our open API to sync with Fitbit. So is in this process when is decided how is going sync the information.

See you around folks and keep participating in our Community.