Garmin negative calorie adjustments are stupid

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phrobbert
phrobbert Posts: 47 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
So I get through my workday and I'm showing +20KCals from my daily activity. I jog the distance to my park workout group (76KCals), do the workout session (676KCals) then head home at a fast walk (176KCals)

So now MFP has me down as all that but -196KCals, so actually less than I had before leaving the house 90mins earlier. I mean, I know that's tracking against an estimated day-long burn but it seems stupid that I can go and do a whole bunch of exercise only for it say "Nah mate, you've barely bothered. Do some burpees in the shower or something". Ugh.

:*

Replies

  • gotpita
    gotpita Posts: 15 Member
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    I just turn it off
  • ritzvin
    ritzvin Posts: 2,860 Member
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    Is the run logged separately (either garmin and/or MFP)?

    Garmin implements this a bit poorly when mixed with actual exercise. Basically (like Fitbit) Garmin estimates your TDEE (supposedly includes all your activity) and compares this to what MFP has as your TDEE (including logged exercise), and adjusts MFP to match. Unlike Fitbit, however (at least I'm told Fitbit does it this way), it appears to sum your day based on the step tracker only instead of deducting off the measured active periods then adding the measured activities..so the estimate for an active time period on the step tracker side may be very wrong - this results in activities not measurable by the tracker (like cycling) to be completely negated.

    (I think they pretty much looked at Fitbit's success, said OMG-we can sell running watches now to people that don't exercise, and jumped on the bandwagon as quick as they could without quite working out the bugs).

    I'm not sure why you have such a large negative though, unless the run was entered separately directly into MFP, or you weren't wearing the watch while running (the discrepancy as described above shouldn't be very high for running, unlike for cycling where the step tracker side sees nothing). (Or if you incorrectly set your base activity too high and 20000 steps is a negative adjustment)

    If your base level is set to sedentary (or you know you always match the activity level you set during a typical day at work), then yeah- I would probably turn it off.

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