Negative calorie adjustments

darinr80

Can someone help me understand what negative calorie adjustments are in this app? I only use my iPhone 7 for fitness tracking when I go running to figure out how far I went and how many calories I burned. I use my fitness pal to track my calorie consumption. I have had negative calorie adjustments off until now to try it out but I'm not sure what it does.

philipjorourke

It's a bit involved, but the negative calorie adjustment is the difference between calories recorded as burned on your fitness tracking device and those entered directly on MFP, which treats your device as the authoritative source and calculates all manual entries as duplicates of those recorded by your tracking device.

Try it out, when you have a negative adjustment, add an arbitrary exercise with 1000 calories burned to MFP, and you'll see that the negative deficit increases by 1000.

It's even more complex when setting your Daily Nutritional Goals, particularly if you use the guided tool, and more so with Custom Daily Goals.

For example, it's your regularly Monday run; MFP is expecting you to burn 500 calories and your daily calorie allowance is increased to allow for this. Let's say you had a good day and burned 750 calories, but you forgot your tracker before embarking on that epic run and recorded the results manually onto MFP manually. When it syncs, MFP will reduce your allowable calorie intake to match the activity supposedly recorded on your tracker. Your tracker didn't record the run and MFP deducts those 750 calories from your daily allowance. If your tracker has been lying idle for the day, that will produce a negative reduction, i.e. your tracker says you haven't burned any calories, the 750 calories manually entered are treated as a duplicate entry, and you now have a -750 calorie deficit on your daily intake.

That might leave you in a position where you have purportedly overeaten during the day. Instead of enjoying your 1800 calories, plus those earned on your run, MFP says you've exceeded your daily limit.

I believe it's a flaw in how MFP calculates the calorie adjustment; it should treat all manual entries as just that, calories burned that have not been recorded on your tracker.

Personally, I prefer to manage everything manually, for three reasons:

1. the lifestyle setting is a global variable, with calories burned through exercise amortised across the number of training sessions you plan to do in a week- 1200 calories over three training sessions = 400 per session on specified days. Fine if you maintain that schedule but for me, no two weeks are the same. I may often skip training on a Monday (work) and go the following day, which generates a massive negative difference in comparison to what was predicted on the Monday and conversely a huge surplus on Tuesday because of the reliance on data from the tracker.
2. Not all devices record all activity. I have a Withings for step count and sleep, but it won't measure how long I have been on a rowing machine, stationary bike, swimming or the number reps I have done on the bench press. So, on a day when I have been at the gym, MFP will calculate a significant negative adjustment because my tracker doesn't match the manual entries on MFP. The harder you work at the gym, the more manual entries you put on MFP, the bigger the negative adjustment.

I hope that helps?

jennybearlv

In my experience using a Garmin Vivoactive the negative adjustments just screwed everything up. Like I would get 200 calories from step activity throughout the day, then record say a 400 calorie run using my Garmin with a chest strap in the evening. I get home, everything syncs up, and I get credit for the 400 calorie run, but for some reason my step activity value is now only 50 calories or a negative number. It didn't add up so I turned negative adjustments off and everything makes more sense now. I hope you have better luck with your phone.

jennybearlv

Oh, snap. This post is from October. Well, if you did the experiment and your still around OP tell us how it went.