Please help me understand exercise calories

wwkwag

I'm trying to understand my exercise calories. I like to eat back about half of them but I want to make sure I'm eating enough with the activity I'm doing. My confusion is because I have a Garmin Vivovit that I keep on all the time. So, I understand basically about the negative number because they don't want you "double dipping" so to speak. However, it's still a bit confusing.

I'm going to use yesterday as an example since the full day is gone and it had time for the rest of my resting calories to go in.

In MFP, I have my activity level set at sedentary since I do have a desk job. For activity, I use MapMyFitness. It's set up with my height and weight and I either do treadmill or if I'm doing my exercise outside, it uses GPS. So, for yesterday MapMyFitness automatically synced in to MFP that I burned 601 calories. So, if I didn't have a fitness band, it would add 601 calories that I could eat. With my fitness band (which I keep on all the time), at the end of the day it gave me negative 244 (I took 14,045 steps) and so with the fitness band and other activity combined, at the end of the day MFP said I earned 357 extra calories.

I hope I didn't make that more confusing than it should be. I'm just trying to figure out why with no fitness band it says I can eat 601 extra calories but with the band it says I can eat 357 extra calories. I'm usually pretty intelligent and can figure this stuff out but this one has me stumped!

Thanks!

janejellyroll

I don't use your specific products, but I think the difference is that the activity level you chose when you set up your account assumes a certain amount of activity and your overall movement for the day isn't measuring up to that activity level -- so part of your exercise is "covering" that. I use a Fitbit and if I run and burn 600 calories, but don't move much the rest of the day, some of that exercise is going to just count as the everyday activity MFP assumes that I will be doing, so eating it back would be "double-dipping."

What is your activity level set at?

wwkwag

janejellyroll wrote: »

I don't use your specific products, but I think the difference is that the activity level you chose when you set up your account assumes a certain amount of activity and your overall movement for the day isn't measuring up to that activity level -- so part of your exercise is "covering" that. I use a Fitbit and if I run and burn 600 calories, but don't move much the rest of the day, some of that exercise is going to just count as the everyday activity MFP assumes that I will be doing, so eating it back would be "double-dipping."

What is your activity level set at?

Sorry - I updated my post - it's set at sedentary as I have a desk job.