Hello!
I tried to link the post I made in Fitbit but I don’t think that’s allowed here so I’ll give y’all a synopsis and you can check it out there if you’d like.
I’ve always struggled/been worried about TDEE. I’ve used 100 different calculators and usually got pretty similar results but it all seemed so vague and I didn’t know how they would know activity based on such broad terms. I got a Fitbit and I liked the calories burned feature but never really believed it. Sometimes it had me burning 3000 calories! For reference, I’m female, 19 years old, 5’5, and 127 lbs (though I started at a higher weight).
I decided to do a one month “finding maintenance” experiment to determine how many calories I really need each day now that I’m pretty much ready to maintain my weight and stop losing. So for the past 28 days, I ate 1800 calories as a daily average.
Method: I tracked and weighed as much as humanly possible. Not all places have nutrition facts and sometimes I couldn’t weigh the whole portion or individual parts of a meal. Sometimes I snacked without weighing and had to guess after. I also didn’t count most spices, gum, and just recently found out my coffee order is 40 calories rather than 20 (not a huge bump, but they all add up). In any case, I’d like to think I was fairly accurate in counting but I’m still human. I would wager any inaccuracy would be me underreporting rather than over-reporting, which would make the final results of the accuracy of Fitbit in favor of the app, reducing the amount of overestimation.
Results: after 28 days of eating 1800 calories, I lost 3.6 lbs. I weighed myself daily at approx the same time and input the weight in Happy Scale. The 3.6 lb figure is a weighted average of the 28 days. This means that I was burning 450 calories more than I was eating each day, creating a TDEE of about 2250. My Fitbit Alta HR reported that I burned, on average, 2500 calories over the past 28 days. This means my Fitbit overestimate my calories burned by 10% which honestly is not very much. When I would “check” to see if I was really eating around what I thought was maintenance, I was estimating that it was 20% off.
Tl;dr: TDEE is hard to calculate. Fitbit HR Alta overestimated calories by 10%. You could potentially use this info to calculate a custom TDEE by multiplying your Fitbit calories burned by .9 and eating back that many calories each day.
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from loseit - Lose the Fat https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/avxhoo/determine_calories_out_my_experience_with_fitbit/
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