FitDay Calorie Expenditures - How accurate?

For that reason, I didnt use fitday ( I lost quite a bit of weight)

What I did was fairly simple and straightforward.
For 1 week I ate 2000 calories/day, and at the end of the week, I had lost 2.2 lbs. That would mean I was at a calorie deficit of about 1000cals/day. If you want to lose more, I would exercise more. Lose less, if you feel youre losing too much muscle, eat more.

It takes a little longer, but I didnt trust fitday to tell me how much I was burning.
Good luck!

When I logged everything in to fitday (and made sure I was in the proper deficit) I always hit my weight loss goals.  After a while I knew how much activities burned, so I just started logging food on here since fitday started getting all quirky earlier this year and would take 10 minutes to add something. 

I always thought that the cal expenditures were a bit low, but now that I've got a HRM, they are close enough. 

I used FitDay for about 6 months last year. The consistantly over estimated the calories taken in and under estimated the calories burned.

All I did was enter in my lifestyle, I don't bother adding in exercises as I do all that here. The caloric restriction that fit day set works like a charm for me. I attached a chart of my recent goal. The peaks and valleys reflect very well when I went over or under on my goal.




Edited by brimstone 2009-07-14 4:03 PM






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I use fitday, and also set my lifestyle to "sedentary" and just add in all my activities (but I only add cycling, running, walking, swimming, & cleaning). It seems to me to be pretty accurate. It set my base calorie expenditures at around 1780 cal each day (I weigh ~120), which is consistent with a lot of other scientific websites/calculators.

I think they made a change on the website a while ago, to account for "non-activity" time. I think in the past, any activities you added were just added on top of that base rate. But the calories burned should really only be the incremental ones (i.e. you burned 300 calories running, but would've burned 100 just sitting around). Before, I think fitday would have stated that run as an extra 300 calorie expenditure, but now it only increases your net burn by 200. I think this is definitely more accurate. Using other calculators and treadmill data (I know, very inaccurate), I used to estimate my extra calorie expenditure for running at 100 cal/mile. But looking at the incremental calories, I really have to run 1.5 mile for every 100 extra calories I want to burn. I really like that fitday automatically takes this into account. I don't weight myself regularly or track data points, so I can't confirm the accuracy, but it feels pretty accurate to me.

Either way, I have definitely found that writing down my calories per day really helps me make better food choices, which is a very good thing!

I used FitDay for probably close to a year and IMO the Livestrong site is WAY better. I also have the app for my iphone. You can save meals, and the web portion is free.  I found FitDay to be clunky with ads at times, and have been using Livestrong since November. You track food, exercise, etc.

One thing on weight loss-- I lost 40lbs following healthy eating from Weight Watchers. I still track so that I wont gain it back and its been 2 yrs now.  Its a balance of not only calories, but high fiber, low fat (the RIGHT fats and fiber) plus calories.  Whole grains, try to limit sugars and prepared foods, and lots of fruit and veggies!  If you dont "cheat" the healthy amt of weight loss is only 1-3 lbs a wk i think....