A guide to beeminding MyFitnessPal calories

Akrasia
1

Since @matti is compiling this amazing list of every known Beeminder integration, I wanted to share the roundabout but functional process I use to get my calories consumed from MyFitnessPal to Beeminder.

The gist is to use a free Fitbit account as the glue, and use a combination of the Fitbit/MFP integration and the official Fitbit integration to bridge the gap. I’m an Android user and this works great on my Pixel 2, but I can’t speak for iPhone users unfortunately :frowning:

To start with, you’ll need a MyFitnessPal account, a Beeminder account (obviously) and a Fitbit account. The easiest way to do this is to download the Fitbit app and create one.

Then, do the following:

  1. In the MFP app, tap “Me” in the bottom right corner.
  2. Tap the gear in the upper right to open the settings menu.
  3. Tap “My Apps and Devices.”
  4. Look for “Fitbit Tracker” in the list of all apps and tap it.
  5. Tap “Connect.”

That establishes the connection between Fitbit and MFP. Now, we’ll work on the connection from Fitbit to Beeminder.

  1. Log in to your Beeminder account and create a new Fitbit goal.
  2. Pledge to track “Total Calories Eaten.” I recommend this BMR calculator to get a sense of how many calories you need to consume to maintain or lose weight. Generally speaking, you need a daily defecit of 500 calories to lose a pound a week. That’s extremely fast loss, though, and difficult to maintain, so perhaps it’s better to shoot for half or a third or a quarter pound per week, so your target might be (1.2 x BMR) - X, where X is 250, 166, or 125, respectively.
  3. Finish setting up the goal as normal.
  4. That’s it!

et voila! No Fitbit device required :smile:

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If you find a way to beemind net calories of MFP (eaten vs spent) i would be grateful :slight_smile:

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Could you join in IFTTT and add negative datapoints for spent calories?

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MyFitnessPal doesn’t seem to share the data in any way. They only send calories eaten to Fitbit and iOS Health

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You might be able to do some kind of hacky integration between MFP and Strava, and sync Strava to fitbit. I’m honestly not 100% sure how things work with MFP and calories out, and their implementation of inter-app activity sync seems to vary between iOS and Android. If you’re okay using Beeminder as the best indicator of net calories as opposed to MFP, you could sync Strava or the tracker of your choice to fitbit, or add activities to Fitbit directly, then let the OS sync propagate all of that back to MFP.

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Thanks for the suggestion. The issue is currently MFP and Garmin are integrated and Garmin comes up with a calorie adjustment based on activity during the day (on top of any workouts). And this number seem to exist only on MFP’s side and not shared in any manner.

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Hmm, I’d give tapiriik or fitnesssyncer a try for getting individual activities over from Garmin to other services. Tapiriik is more intuitive, but is a couple dollars a month for autosync, and fitnesssyncer is a little less easily to use but free and automatic, if I remember right.

That might let you get calories burned into Fitbit, though it seems like it won’t track steps or background activity, just active calories.

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This is what i’m talking about

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36AB6C31-7FDA-4AD8-9EE4-58EF4C09BD12.jpeg1125×497 94.6 KB

This “Garmin connect calorie adjustment” is just an entry on MFP, not a workout and thus not shared on any service line tapiriik

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Ok turns out that Garmin writes on the “resting energy” field in Health , a number quite analogous to what is written in MFP
So this might be possible with positive/negative points after all

Edit: The “resting energy” posted by Garmin is not exactly analogous to what it posts to MFP, so I’m back to manual…

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A note for iOS users: MFP writes on the “Dietary Energy” field of Health, which can be beeminded with the iOS app.

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