Please explain in 3rd grade terms how Fitbit and MFP work for Exercise

[betheriver]

Hi all, I've been an on/off again user of My Fitness Pal for awhile now. I'm trying to get more serious and consistent as I get older.

I recently bought a Fitbit Blaze and synced the Fitbit app with MFP. I'm very confused about the Fitbit and MFP relationship when accounting for calories from exercise.

When I first synced I read on the Fitbit website to enter my exercises on MFP only, not on Fitbit. I don't fully understand this because the Fitbit workouts are automatically added to the Fitbit app.

Needless to say, I did an Insanity workout and burned 515. I followed the instructions and input this on MFP. Then the Fitbit adjustment came, adding about 250 calories to my allowance along with the 515 allowed by the exercise I added to MFP, adding a total of 764 calories to my allowance.

This didn't seem right to me as someone who is looking to drop some pounds. I checked the Fitbit website, which advised NOT to add exercises to MFP and the Fitbit app would make the calorie adjustment. So I deleted my original MFP exercise leaving the extra allowance at 250.

I know this is a lengthy post, but I'm very confused by this and want to get the most from both apps. So what is the right way to do this, and is it the same for weight training?

One thing I noticed is you can add a weight loss goal to Fitbit, but it doesn't ask you at what rate you want to lose the weight like MFP does. Will this matter when Fitbit makes the adjustment?

Thanks for any help. As you can see I'm pretty confused!

[deliz618]

The best way for me to explain is by example. Here's what I do: I have my MFP set to lose 2 pounds a week and my activity level set as sedentary. That gives me a goal of 1340 calories to eat per day, assuming I am sedentary and do nothing active all day. Then I link fitbit to MFP and let fitbit do all of the activity calculations. Add your workouts to fitbit ONLY. Not to MFP, because you may end up "double dipping" so to speak.

So on a gym day, I will burn around 3000 calories, which is reflected on my fitbit as calories burned.
3000 calories burned minus 1340 eaten leaves me a deficit of 1660. In order to lose my 2 pounds per week, I need a deficit of 1000 calories a day. When fitbit connects to MFP, by the end of the day it will calculate that I have 660 extra exercise calories. So in order to maintain my 1000 calorie deficit (aka 2 pounds lost per week) I can eat up to 660 more calories.

So when you burn 515 calories in an insanity workout and your mfp only reflect 250 calories extra to eat, it's because the day isn't over yet and it's trying to estimate what your total calorie burn for the day will be. If your mfp is set to 1500 calories a day for example, and you've burned 500 calories in an exercise to make a total of 2000 calories burned for today so far (according to fitbit) your mfp would probably tell you you can eat a couple hundred more, it may not make sense right away because it is trying to estimate how much you will burn in an entire day and give you the calories to match your desired deficit.

Hopefully that helps a little. If you let us know what your goals are as far as pounds per week to lose and your allotted daily calories from mfp I can probably help explain a little better.

[Rich_Laue]

Since this is a third party question and not having anything to do with the tracker model, I've moved the post to the Third Party integrations forum. This way it will benefit all members, and have a wider audience for an answer.