My Fitness Pal erasing all my Fitbit active minutes

[GlasgowGrey]

For at least a year, I've been confused about why my active minutes were suddenly disappearing on my Fitbit.  I even bought a new Fitbit, in the hope it was a hardware glitch.  It kept on happening (But I did get a nice Charge 2 from my husband on my birthday, so not all was wasted  )

Finally, I've noticed a link.  It's My Fitness Pal, where I log all my food.  My account there is linked to my Fitbit so I can send the calorie and nutrition data over.  If I log all my planned food at the start of the day, and then don't use My Fitness Pal for the rest of the day, my active minutes on Fitbit stay intact and accurate.  If I log into My Fitness Pal during the day because I've had an unscheduled snack, it wipes all my active minutes on Fitbit.  

Other than un-linking my Fitbit and My Fitness Pal (Which I really don't want to do), is there a way around this?

[Rich_Laue]

I think i would start by reassign to posts @GlasgowGrey

MyFitnessPal: How to correct calorie discrepancy f... 

MyFitnessPal

Activity - weight - food will get transferred from my fitness pal k to Fitbit .

Any activity sent over from MFP will overide the activity recorded by your tracker and may affect the active minutes. 

I've also moved your non Charge 2 question into the third party interface board. 

[GlasgowGrey]

Okay, fine to move it, but none of those links have offered a solution to my problem.  Maybe I need to rephrase my question.

Is there any way to stop My Fitness Pal overwriting the active minutes data? 

[Rich_Laue]

The only way MFP should overwrite your step data is if MFP has recorded an activity. Does MFP record any of your step activity? 

This is explained in the link i provided. 

I moved it because MFP and the tracker do not sync, all acting is between your Fitbit account and MFP. 

[RobertoME]

Hi there @GlasgowGrey thanks for posting in the Fitbit Community! I got to say @Rich_Laue is correct when is mentioned that MyFitnessPal does not have access to delete your information, unless the entry logged in MFP is at the same time a Fitbit activity was logged.

The exercises logged in MFP are shared to your Fitbit account as a Manual Activity in your Dashboard. As you might know with manual activities, all steps, calories, and active minutes recorded by your tracker are overridden for the duration of a manually logged activity by the activity's entered values. This ensures that your steps are not counted twice as long as the manually logged activity has the correct start time and duration.

So, it's recommendable not to logged both exercises in your accounts when there is an integration between them. If the issue still persists and this is not the scenario, it would be require to have a closer look. If is possible feel free to share some screenshots that represent the issue to find a solution. If you need help uploading screenshots, this post will served as a reference.

See you later, I will be reviewing this thread if you have more questions.

[GlasgowGrey]

I don't use MFP for anything other than logging food.  If MFP is picking up data on active minutes, I don't know where it's getting that data from.  I don't know how to manually add exercise data to MFP.  It used to take step counts from Fitbit, but I stopped it from doing that.  My active minutes still disappear if I log into MFP during the day.

[Rich_Laue]

Have you contacted MFP and asked if they know of a reason why when simply logging in. data of some type is sent to Fitbit and any active minutes disappear. 

Do you get some type of event logged under your Fitbit activities? If so this could explain why the active minutes disappear. 

Feel free to forward my post to MFP. 

[RobertoME]

Hi there @GlasgowGrey, thanks for the additional details. Certainly this is an odd behavior if you are not logging more that just your food entries.

Let's do something. Please refer to your Fitbit.com Dashboard and access your exercise history data. Here you will see all your exercise entries. If you see an activity that has (MyFitnessPal) below the exercise name, this will explain why you are losing active minutes.

To give you an example of what we are looking, refer to this screenshot:

Otherwise just as @Rich_Laue mentioned, you can contact MFP customer support to have some extra help too.

See you later. I'll be looking forward to your response.