Are fitness trackers duping us into eating more calories?

ThrivesOnNeglect

G'day,

I just read an article here HERE which has me a little worried. Essentially, the article states that whatever activity we set as our baseline is an expectation consumed by calories in/out. When Fitbit reports the activity to Cronometer and increases the amount of calories we can consume each day, it's not taking into account the expected activity as per the original goal.

For example, I log a sedentary lifestyle. That takes a certain amount of calories into account. Fitbit then reports to Cronometer that I've got an excess 900 calories by the end of day , I then decide on a larger dinner. Whereas in reality, that 900 was already accounted for as a part of the sedentary lifestyle option set. In effect, I'm doubling up on my calories and being duped into thinking I have calories to play with.

Are you able to kindly confirm whether Cronometer works this way.

Kindly,
T.

Hilary

If you are using an activity tracker that imports a general activity amount, we recommend setting your activity level on Cronometer to "None". You can learn more in our user manual here: https://cronometer.com/help/profile/#vitals

comanchesue

Are you saying that Cronometer figures a set number of calories burned by the activity level I select and doesn't adjust for the calories imported via fitbit? Fitbit only seems to import calories burned via activity - is this why you suggested setting activity level to zero? Doesn't that fudge my baseline calorie burn?

Hilary

Hi @comanchesue , we import a "general activity" value from Fitbit, which will be more accurate than our estimated general activity value. The general activity levels you can set in Cronometer are estimated, as we are not a wearable activity tracker, so this is the next best alternative!

ThrivesOnNeglect

@comanchesue that's exactly what she's saying. Same thing happened to us and we went way over on calories for weeks before figuring it out.

comanchesue

Luckily I've only recently paid attention to the 'calories left to eat' info so this hasn't affected my weight loss for long. If I set the activity level to none though, I'm allowed to eat less than 1k in calories. I think it's because Fitbit only exports active minutes so it wouldn't include puttering around the house or the yard. I've changed it to sedentary and the calories allowed are more what I'd expect. I'm really glad I saw this thread.