manually entering exercize messing up step count for challenges

[rebekahwright]

I use my fitbit in conjunction with the My Fitness Pal app.  Before my fitbit, I would manually enter EVERY exercize and enter it into MFP and it would credit me with calories earned.  Didn't matter too much because I never eat my earned callories, but it's nice to get "credit" for hard work! 

My Alta supposedly does exercize recognition - it does pretty well most of the time, but it is odd the way it guesses the calories burned.  It doesn't have a HR monitor, and it randomly assigns callories burned.  Sometimes an hour in a high intensity class only credits me for 20 minutes and about 150 calories!!! So, my answer to this has been to DELETE the auto detected exersize and manually enter it with the time, length and calories I think are reasonable.  But that somehow magically deletes thousands of steps!  Which is so weird, since it obviously didn't detect the steps in the first place.  I understand why it doesn't add extra steps, but why on earth would it delete steps??

Because of this - Im getting shorted on challenges with friends.  I want all my steps to show - I want to have credit for my exersize with reasonable time, steps and calories earned.  One time while trying to correct a problem like this, having logged 22,000 steps in one day (awesome right?)  I tried to correct the exersize so that the calories were reasonable.  Because really, people if I walked 22,000 steps I PROBABLY burned more than 2010 calories that day.  Not unreasonable to want my goals all in green, including my calories burned. So this day I tried to manually fix it - I deleted the auto recognized exercize and entered it correctly and reasonably (it can't add steps if you do this, just calories and active minutes)  but  it DELETED 4,000 steps from my day, making me LOOSE challenge that I obviously won.  UGGGHHHh.

So now I'm tempted to just manually log my exercize in My Fitness Pal, but it messes up all kinds of things with fitbit if you do it that way.  Plus what's the point of auto recognize if I have to do that?  Am I right on this?  Manually entered exercize goes in Fitbit right? 

Please fix this!  I don't think you all should be worried about "cheaters"  We are only cheating ourselves if we do - allow us a bit of control here. 

[AndrewFitbit]

@rebekahwright So, couple things I want to point out.

• If you're deleting auto-recognized activities and manually logging an activity over that time period, then yes, it's possible to lose steps since manual activities will override tracker data.

• Manually logged activities don't count toward challenges, therefore, logging activities over your tracker's data will result in a lower step count in challenges.
• Exercises from MyFitnessPal are synced to Fitbit as manually logged activities

One way you can add calories without overriding your tracker's data is to log a 1 second custom activity and put whatever calories you feel is reasonable to add to your total. Here's what it would look like: