Myfitnesspal and fitbit where to log activities?

[Cushman68]

Here is yet another MFP / Fitbit question...

I have been logging all of my activites (workouts and such) in Fitbit. I think the burn is fairly accurate and like the integration with my everyday cost of living burned calories.

I use MFP to log my foods.

At the end of the day it seems as if both systems have a nice sync process... my Fitbit stats are pulled over to MFP, calulates based on any over/under from either system, deducts my workouts from regular being alive calories and gives me my total burn.

Question... am I correct in assuming that this is how the system (above) is supposed to work?  I want to be sure that I am not over estimating or double dipping on my daily calorie burn. That would be scary...

Thanks in advance for your comments.

[SteveH]

I don't think there is a right or wrong way to do this. Some people like to log both their food and additional activities into MFP and this seems to work fine for them. I prefer to do what you do, log food in MFP and log activities into fitbit. This just seems a cleaner, simpler way of doing things.

It all seems to work fine for me. The only change I made was in MFP's settings there is an option to "enable negative adjustments". By setting this, if you have a particularly slow day fitbit will pass MFP a negative calorie adjustment which reduces the amount of calories it lets you eat. 

Otherwise, the more effort I record into fitbit (automatic or via adding activities) the more the adjustment sent over to MFP and the more I am allowed to eat (hooray!)

It is important that your settings (weight etc) and your weight plan are set up the same in both fitbit and MFP.

[cristalee]

However I cannot see how the negative calorie adjustment that fitbit is sending can be correct. For example, I have my total calories in MFP set to 1200. I take a step class in the morning at 9 am and use my heart rate monitor to record the calorie burn. I input that into MFP. So I have burned 450 calories. At lunch time I check MFP to input calories and fitbit has a negative calorie adjustment. Despite the fact I already have around 6000 steps in for the day plus I did an hour of intese cardio. Why does fitbit think I am not burning enough calories and subtracting out. It just doesn't make logical sense to me. So instead of having 1200 + 450 calories available, it was subtracting back out around 300 calories. How can that be with my level of activity?

[SteveH]

That does sound weird. It's as though MFP hadn't synced the activitiy caloires into fitbit and, as fitbit, wasn't aware that you did the workout, it created a negative adjustment which, strangely, did sync to MFP. I'm afraid I don't know what's happening, but it makes even more sure that I'll log all my activities into fitbit.

I hope you get this sorted and would appreciate an update to let us know the answer when you do.

[cristalee]

I am waiting to see my weekly stats and compare that to my weightloss this week. I want to see how they line up. For now I took out the negative calorie adjustment from fitbit because i worry about slowing metabolism by putting my body into starvation mode if I don't eat enough and i try to only eat the calories I am allowed on my harder goal of 2 pounds per week and I try to eat back my exercise calories. It will be interesting to see how many calories fitbit has me at a deficit and how that lines up with my loss. MFP had me off by half a pound. According to calories in vs out on MFP I burned enough calories for 2.5 pounds loss but I only lost 2. Of course that could be that MFP gives higher calorie burn for exercise than what actual occurs which I feel is definitely true so that could be the difference. I did not weigh myself when I started two weeks ago so I am not sure how week one lined up.