Integrate WLR with Your Fitbit or Garmin
Integrating your Fitbit or Garmin with wlr makes life easier when you're tracking food calories, especially for UK users.
You can try out your tracker with WLR by taking a free trial - it's a simple 2-steps to integrate.
Full information is available once you're logged in and there is a special Fitbit & Garmin message board for discussion and help, but read on if you want the details of how syncing with WLR works now.
Activity Calories and Steps: Tracker > WLR
WLR pulls your calories from workouts, and any additional calories that you burn, and puts the details into your WLR Exercise Diary. Additional calories are those that you burn over and above the amount already allowed for in your WLR Daily Calorie Quota - which is based on your selected background activity level. Your daily steps are also shown in your Exercise Diary.
Exercise/Activity Calories
If you wear your tracker all day every day we suggest that you set your background activity level in WLR to sedentary or moderately sedentary, and use the data from your tracker to determine your actual calorie burn.
You will see, in your WLR exercise diary:
- Exercise that your tracker has detected automatically
- Exercise that you have manually entered into your tracker
- Extra calories that you have burned. (Calories burned as shown by your tracker that are over and above those already accounted for by your daily calorie quota and specific exercise calories.)
All of the above calories are counted as exercise calories and therefore added to your total calories burned. You should be able to eat all these calories and still lose weight at the rate shown in Goals and Results.
Daily Calorie Quota, Calories Burned and Background Activity Level
It may take a day or two for you to get comfortable with a new way of looking at your daily calorie quota, calories burned, and what background activity level you should set.
If you find that you consistently have more than a couple of hundred ‘Activity Tracker Extra Calories’ appearing in your exercise diary each day, it’s a good idea to move your WLR background activity level up a step – to make your basic WLR daily calorie quota more in line with what you are actually burning. Especially since using a tracker motivates you to move more.
Conversely, if you never or rarely see ‘Activity Tracker Extra Calories’ in your exercise diary, it may be an idea to move your WLR background activity level down a step to get a bit more insight into the number of calories you are actually burning.
No one burns exactly the same number of calories every day, so it’s always helpful to look at your calorie burn and intake in the context of a week. The Calories History Report in WLR will enable you to do this.
Steps
Steps are shown as a separate section in your WLR exercise diary and do not, in themselves, change your calorie burn numbers. This is because the number of steps you take are already factored in to the calories burned numbers sent from your tracker to WLR.
Adding Exercise
Workouts automatically detected by your Fitbit or Garmin will be synced with WLR when you sync your tracker app.
If you need to add your exercise workouts manually, you should add them on your tracker and they will be synced with WLR when you sync your app.
Whilst it is still possible to add exercise direct to your WLR exercise diary when you have your tracker integrated, it is not recommended. Your tracker will not ‘know’ about this exercise, which could result in a less accurate calorie burn estimate.
Food and Calorie Info: WLR > Tracker
WLR will send the name of the food or drink, and the number of calories consumed to your tracker. The tracker app uses this information, along with number of calories it forecasts you’re likely to burn for the day, to calculate its estimate of how many calories you have left for the day.
If you choose this option, only enter food and drinks (including water) via your WLR food diary. Items added directly to your tracker will not appear in your WLR food diary and your calorie calculations will get out of sync.
Meal Types
The tracker apps do not currently offer as many meal types as you’ll find in WLR, and there is no specific category for drinks, so you’ll need to decide which meal types to use in WLR that also make sense to you in the tracker app.
Here’s how WLR meal types will show up in the Fitbit app:
| WLR Meal Type | Fitbit Meal Type |
|---|---|
| Breakfast | Breakfast |
| Lunch | Lunch |
| Dinner | Dinner |
| Snacks | Morning Snack |
| Tea | Anytime |
| Supper | Anytime |
| Drinks | Anytime |
| Alcohol | Anytime |
| Treat | Anytime |
| Oops! | Anytime |
| Junk | Anytime |
| Other | Anytime |
Water
Water added to your food diary is added automatically to the Water section of the tracker app. You’ll need to use the ‘water, mineral or tap’ record in WLR
Weight Updates: WLR > Tracker
WLR sends your new current weight to your tracker app whenever you update your weight.
Weight and Calorie Calculations
Your current weight is used by your tracker app and WLR in calorie burn calculations, so it’s important that it’s kept up to date and in sync.
We recommend weighing in once a week or more on WLR, and we’ll send your new weight to your tracker app each time you weigh in. Always updating your weight from WLR will ensure that your app and WLR are making calculations on the same basis.
Try Your Fitbit or Garmin with WLR, Free
Pulls your workouts and calories burned into WLR, pushes food and calories consumed to your tracker app Try it free!
