Garmin users - calorie steps
BootyEvolve
Posts: 45 Member
Question for you all!! I have my activity set to sedentary because unless I work, I sit pretty much all day. When I do work (4 to 4.5 hours a day up to 5 days a week) I'm either standing the whole time or walking around. DO YOU count/eat your walking calories earned? I am curious as to how many of you (striving for weightloss) either eat them or Don't. I am striving to eat my workout calories but not sure if eating my walking calories would be a good idea too.
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Replies
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I don't hook my Garmin up to MFP. If I did I would often be given 4000+ kcal a day to eat and frankly that is ridiculous for my activity level and weight loss goal per week. Apply common sense I suppose.1
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Mine (Fenix 5X) seems pretty reasonable for walking calories, so I generally trust it.1
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I am set to active, and I do get a few exercise calories for the first 10,000 steps, but I don't count them because of my MFP setting. Then, I go on 30 per 1000 steps, which is usually less than Garmin gives me. I found a formula online that helped calculate calories burned from steps (non-intentional exercise). My exercise burns really seem to be spot on, though.0
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I do because I know I'm lowballed on steps from my device/Garmin (Vivoactive) and exercise is spot on. Always have. Every. Last. Calorie.0
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I use a Garmin 235. It counts daily steps and I also use it to log my exercises, which get automatically sent here. However-- one error is that it sends total calories and not net, so it's over by about 50 calories per hour (keep that in mind if you have it synching automatically).
MFP will also make a "Garmin Connect Calorie Adjustment" if you want it to-- this will adjust your overall calories up or down (you can disable negative adjustments if you want) based on your daily activity (that is your steps, not your exercise). I have it doing that too.
I have my activity level set as "sedentary" as well, but the Garmin adjustment will take care of that.1 -
I have a garmin Vivo fit HR and for 8,000 steps it says I get around 1,100 calories. That too me seems like a huge amount. I even went through and put how many steps I take in x amount of steps. My job is physical (lifting often) but still lol.0
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BootyEvolve wrote: »I have a garmin Vivo fit HR and for 8,000 steps it says I get around 1,100 calories. That too me seems like a huge amount. I even went through and put how many steps I take in x amount of steps. My job is physical (lifting often) but still lol.
Are you saying you get 1100 calories in MFP? Because that doesn't mean that the walking gave you 1100, but that your total calories are being adjusted so that Garmin and MFP match. If you are doing a physical job those calories are counted by garmin even if you aren't getting steps. That is where activity level comes into play. The closer you have MFP set to what garmin is calculating, the smaller that number for 8000 steps would be.1 -
I've been getting extremely high numbers from my Garmin Vivoactive HR+ for a pretty paltry amount of steps. I'm going to try updating my activity setting and seeing if that makes a difference.0
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BootyEvolve wrote: »I have a garmin Vivo fit HR and for 8,000 steps it says I get around 1,100 calories. That too me seems like a huge amount. I even went through and put how many steps I take in x amount of steps. My job is physical (lifting often) but still lol.
What? That doesn't sound right.
So far today I have about 2500 steps and my adjustment is 25 calories.
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jennifer_runs wrote: »BootyEvolve wrote: »I have a garmin Vivo fit HR and for 8,000 steps it says I get around 1,100 calories. That too me seems like a huge amount. I even went through and put how many steps I take in x amount of steps. My job is physical (lifting often) but still lol.
What? That doesn't sound right.
So far today I have about 2500 steps and my adjustment is 25 calories.
It's because they have the a HR garmin and that accounts for their full day of calories, including a "physical (lifting often)" job.1 -
Yeah my full day is 2507 calories. If I ate all of that I would gain weight. I'm small (5'0 to 5'1).0
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My experience:
I used a fitbit one for maby years (basic model only counts steps) and had my weight loss pretty closely mirror what was projected taking a deficit out of the daily calorie burns it estimated for me. I felt it was a pretty accurate device.
I recently decided to update my garmin since they are combining activity trackers into their running watches now. I tried the vivosmart hr+ first and found it gave me super crazy calorie burns when using the 24/7 hr monitoring. When I turned that off it was pretty similar to what my fitbit would have estimated.
After that I did some deeper digging and found that the hr activity trackers seems to be way over estimating calories across the board. I am pretty comfortable with the estimates based solely on steps though.
TLDR: if it is estimating off steps alone I would be ok eating them if you want. If your device is 24/7 hr monitoring be very wary of inflated calorie estimates.3 -
jennifer_runs wrote: »I use a Garmin 235. It counts daily steps and I also use it to log my exercises, which get automatically sent here. However-- one error is that it sends total calories and not net, so it's over by about 50 calories per hour (keep that in mind if you have it synching automatically).
MFP will also make a "Garmin Connect Calorie Adjustment" if you want it to-- this will adjust your overall calories up or down (you can disable negative adjustments if you want) based on your daily activity (that is your steps, not your exercise). I have it doing that too.
I have my activity level set as "sedentary" as well, but the Garmin adjustment will take care of that.
Does this mean that the people eating back 100% of their exercise calories are overeating because they are not deducting the net from total calories @jennifer_runs ?0 -
Christine_72 wrote: »jennifer_runs wrote: »I use a Garmin 235. It counts daily steps and I also use it to log my exercises, which get automatically sent here. However-- one error is that it sends total calories and not net, so it's over by about 50 calories per hour (keep that in mind if you have it synching automatically).
MFP will also make a "Garmin Connect Calorie Adjustment" if you want it to-- this will adjust your overall calories up or down (you can disable negative adjustments if you want) based on your daily activity (that is your steps, not your exercise). I have it doing that too.
I have my activity level set as "sedentary" as well, but the Garmin adjustment will take care of that.
Does this mean that the people eating back 100% of their exercise calories are overeating because they are not deducting the net from total calories @jennifer_runs ?
Yes, I think so. The "Garmin Connect Calorie Adjustment" might fix this, but I'm not sure. It seems like it might over-correct for other things so the net is still too high of a calorie allowance.0 -
4legsRbetterthan2 wrote: »My experience:
I used a fitbit one for maby years (basic model only counts steps) and had my weight loss pretty closely mirror what was projected taking a deficit out of the daily calorie burns it estimated for me. I felt it was a pretty accurate device.
I recently decided to update my garmin since they are combining activity trackers into their running watches now. I tried the vivosmart hr+ first and found it gave me super crazy calorie burns when using the 24/7 hr monitoring. When I turned that off it was pretty similar to what my fitbit would have estimated.
After that I did some deeper digging and found that the hr activity trackers seems to be way over estimating calories across the board. I am pretty comfortable with the estimates based solely on steps though.
TLDR: if it is estimating off steps alone I would be ok eating them if you want. If your device is 24/7 hr monitoring be very wary of inflated calorie estimates.
Yeah mine is on 24/7 and I am not sure how to make it stop tacking on the steps calories. I think my BMR is pretty accurate (1694) but then it says with my 10,000 steps i must eat 1500 calories, yeah no. I am not eating 3000 calories a day I'd gain weight. When I exercise (did the stationary bike today for 30 minutes) and it said I burned 169 calories which seems accurate. I am fine with eating 1200 calories + half of my workout calories but I am not eating my steps calories too. That just seems ridiculous and I'd pretty much have to stuff my self full.0 -
BootyEvolve wrote: »4legsRbetterthan2 wrote: »My experience:
I used a fitbit one for maby years (basic model only counts steps) and had my weight loss pretty closely mirror what was projected taking a deficit out of the daily calorie burns it estimated for me. I felt it was a pretty accurate device.
I recently decided to update my garmin since they are combining activity trackers into their running watches now. I tried the vivosmart hr+ first and found it gave me super crazy calorie burns when using the 24/7 hr monitoring. When I turned that off it was pretty similar to what my fitbit would have estimated.
After that I did some deeper digging and found that the hr activity trackers seems to be way over estimating calories across the board. I am pretty comfortable with the estimates based solely on steps though.
TLDR: if it is estimating off steps alone I would be ok eating them if you want. If your device is 24/7 hr monitoring be very wary of inflated calorie estimates.
Yeah mine is on 24/7 and I am not sure how to make it stop tacking on the steps calories. I think my BMR is pretty accurate (1694) but then it says with my 10,000 steps i must eat 1500 calories, yeah no. I am not eating 3000 calories a day I'd gain weight. When I exercise (did the stationary bike today for 30 minutes) and it said I burned 169 calories which seems accurate. I am fine with eating 1200 calories + half of my workout calories but I am not eating my steps calories too. That just seems ridiculous and I'd pretty much have to stuff my self full.
One option would be to only wear it when you are doing intentional exercise. Then you wont get regular steps transferred over.0 -
I sync my exercise calories, but I have steps turned off on MFP because it was giving me way too many calories for them.0
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BootyEvolve wrote: »4legsRbetterthan2 wrote: »My experience:
I used a fitbit one for maby years (basic model only counts steps) and had my weight loss pretty closely mirror what was projected taking a deficit out of the daily calorie burns it estimated for me. I felt it was a pretty accurate device.
I recently decided to update my garmin since they are combining activity trackers into their running watches now. I tried the vivosmart hr+ first and found it gave me super crazy calorie burns when using the 24/7 hr monitoring. When I turned that off it was pretty similar to what my fitbit would have estimated.
After that I did some deeper digging and found that the hr activity trackers seems to be way over estimating calories across the board. I am pretty comfortable with the estimates based solely on steps though.
TLDR: if it is estimating off steps alone I would be ok eating them if you want. If your device is 24/7 hr monitoring be very wary of inflated calorie estimates.
Yeah mine is on 24/7 and I am not sure how to make it stop tacking on the steps calories. I think my BMR is pretty accurate (1694) but then it says with my 10,000 steps i must eat 1500 calories, yeah no. I am not eating 3000 calories a day I'd gain weight. When I exercise (did the stationary bike today for 30 minutes) and it said I burned 169 calories which seems accurate. I am fine with eating 1200 calories + half of my workout calories but I am not eating my steps calories too. That just seems ridiculous and I'd pretty much have to stuff my self full.
There should be a setting to turn activity tracking off if you want no more step calories.0 -
BootyEvolve wrote: »4legsRbetterthan2 wrote: »My experience:
I used a fitbit one for maby years (basic model only counts steps) and had my weight loss pretty closely mirror what was projected taking a deficit out of the daily calorie burns it estimated for me. I felt it was a pretty accurate device.
I recently decided to update my garmin since they are combining activity trackers into their running watches now. I tried the vivosmart hr+ first and found it gave me super crazy calorie burns when using the 24/7 hr monitoring. When I turned that off it was pretty similar to what my fitbit would have estimated.
After that I did some deeper digging and found that the hr activity trackers seems to be way over estimating calories across the board. I am pretty comfortable with the estimates based solely on steps though.
TLDR: if it is estimating off steps alone I would be ok eating them if you want. If your device is 24/7 hr monitoring be very wary of inflated calorie estimates.
Yeah mine is on 24/7 and I am not sure how to make it stop tacking on the steps calories. I think my BMR is pretty accurate (1694) but then it says with my 10,000 steps i must eat 1500 calories, yeah no. I am not eating 3000 calories a day I'd gain weight. When I exercise (did the stationary bike today for 30 minutes) and it said I burned 169 calories which seems accurate. I am fine with eating 1200 calories + half of my workout calories but I am not eating my steps calories too. That just seems ridiculous and I'd pretty much have to stuff my self full.
That is a crazy number. I'm going to guess your heart rate is up from the heavy lifting and that's where the error is coming in. I have had three Garmin non-HR devices and they all underestimate for me. I get less than 400 exercise calories for 10000 steps. Look up your instruction manual and see if you can turn off the HR feature. It should save you some battery life too. Back before Garmin had built in HR it was pretty common for people to anecdotally report underestimations for step tracking.0 -
I have a Fitbit and 2 Garmin devices. All 3 have HR (I have a second Fitbit that doesn't have HR). I'm sitting at about 16k steps right now. One Garmin device thinks I've burned 3000+ calories for the day, the other thinks I've burned 2650. Both Fitbits are coming in at 2300. Mfp thinks I would burn 1730-so my adjustment would be those numbers minus 1730. After many years of tracking, weighing food, monitoring weight change-my Fitbit is accurate for me and I feel confident in eating the calorie adjustment it gives me (and my weight change follows as expected). Both Garmins are high, but one is ridiculously so. I had a bodymedia armband quite some time ago and it overstated my burn by about 15%. I raised my activity level on mfp to account for that (so the adjustment ended up being correct). It's all trial and error. Give it a shot-track your food (weigh it; log it all) and see if your change in weight follows as expected. If not-then make some adjustments and try again.0
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jennifer_runs wrote: »Christine_72 wrote: »jennifer_runs wrote: »I use a Garmin 235. It counts daily steps and I also use it to log my exercises, which get automatically sent here. However-- one error is that it sends total calories and not net, so it's over by about 50 calories per hour (keep that in mind if you have it synching automatically).
MFP will also make a "Garmin Connect Calorie Adjustment" if you want it to-- this will adjust your overall calories up or down (you can disable negative adjustments if you want) based on your daily activity (that is your steps, not your exercise). I have it doing that too.
I have my activity level set as "sedentary" as well, but the Garmin adjustment will take care of that.
Does this mean that the people eating back 100% of their exercise calories are overeating because they are not deducting the net from total calories @jennifer_runs ?
Yes, I think so. The "Garmin Connect Calorie Adjustment" might fix this, but I'm not sure. It seems like it might over-correct for other things so the net is still too high of a calorie allowance.
The adjustment should fix this. Garmin sends the total calories burned for the day. Mfp subtracts out what it thinks you burned for the day. Both of those should be gross calorie burn numbers because it's what you burned from midnight to 11:59 on both sides. Neither mfp nor Garmin is parsing out any specific time period in this calculation. Just the amount your body burned-regardless of how exercise is tracked (or when). So if your Garmin includes your BMR in the calories it lists for the activity-it's irrelevant for the adjustment. Because you did burn those calories during that time. So it counts them as calories burned for the day (total).
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I don't have a device with wrist based heart rate sensor, but I do have a Garmin Fenix 3, and it seems to be calculating step calories quite accurately. For excercise I wear a HR strap and get believeable numbers too, though as usual, it probably overestimates somewhat.
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jennifer_runs wrote: »Christine_72 wrote: »jennifer_runs wrote: »I use a Garmin 235. It counts daily steps and I also use it to log my exercises, which get automatically sent here. However-- one error is that it sends total calories and not net, so it's over by about 50 calories per hour (keep that in mind if you have it synching automatically).
MFP will also make a "Garmin Connect Calorie Adjustment" if you want it to-- this will adjust your overall calories up or down (you can disable negative adjustments if you want) based on your daily activity (that is your steps, not your exercise). I have it doing that too.
I have my activity level set as "sedentary" as well, but the Garmin adjustment will take care of that.
Does this mean that the people eating back 100% of their exercise calories are overeating because they are not deducting the net from total calories @jennifer_runs ?
Yes, I think so. The "Garmin Connect Calorie Adjustment" might fix this, but I'm not sure. It seems like it might over-correct for other things so the net is still too high of a calorie allowance.
I eat 100% of my calorie adjustment from my VAHR most days and it's 2% underestimating my burns (I monitored the adjustment, food intake, weight and trend weight over a period of 4 weeks) I have been losing at the rate expected with no issues. I have myself set to lightly active (as I get in around 12-14000 steps on a normal day even though I sit at a desk) and have negative adjustments turned on so I don't overeat if I don't hit my expected activity level.0 -
Duck_Puddle wrote: »jennifer_runs wrote: »Christine_72 wrote: »jennifer_runs wrote: »I use a Garmin 235. It counts daily steps and I also use it to log my exercises, which get automatically sent here. However-- one error is that it sends total calories and not net, so it's over by about 50 calories per hour (keep that in mind if you have it synching automatically).
MFP will also make a "Garmin Connect Calorie Adjustment" if you want it to-- this will adjust your overall calories up or down (you can disable negative adjustments if you want) based on your daily activity (that is your steps, not your exercise). I have it doing that too.
I have my activity level set as "sedentary" as well, but the Garmin adjustment will take care of that.
Does this mean that the people eating back 100% of their exercise calories are overeating because they are not deducting the net from total calories @jennifer_runs ?
Yes, I think so. The "Garmin Connect Calorie Adjustment" might fix this, but I'm not sure. It seems like it might over-correct for other things so the net is still too high of a calorie allowance.
The adjustment should fix this. Garmin sends the total calories burned for the day. Mfp subtracts out what it thinks you burned for the day. Both of those should be gross calorie burn numbers because it's what you burned from midnight to 11:59 on both sides. Neither mfp nor Garmin is parsing out any specific time period in this calculation. Just the amount your body burned-regardless of how exercise is tracked (or when). So if your Garmin includes your BMR in the calories it lists for the activity-it's irrelevant for the adjustment. Because you did burn those calories during that time. So it counts them as calories burned for the day (total).
This. My calories in Garmin are always more than in MFP because MFP corrects the adjustment.jennybearlv wrote: »BootyEvolve wrote: »4legsRbetterthan2 wrote: »My experience:
I used a fitbit one for maby years (basic model only counts steps) and had my weight loss pretty closely mirror what was projected taking a deficit out of the daily calorie burns it estimated for me. I felt it was a pretty accurate device.
I recently decided to update my garmin since they are combining activity trackers into their running watches now. I tried the vivosmart hr+ first and found it gave me super crazy calorie burns when using the 24/7 hr monitoring. When I turned that off it was pretty similar to what my fitbit would have estimated.
After that I did some deeper digging and found that the hr activity trackers seems to be way over estimating calories across the board. I am pretty comfortable with the estimates based solely on steps though.
TLDR: if it is estimating off steps alone I would be ok eating them if you want. If your device is 24/7 hr monitoring be very wary of inflated calorie estimates.
Yeah mine is on 24/7 and I am not sure how to make it stop tacking on the steps calories. I think my BMR is pretty accurate (1694) but then it says with my 10,000 steps i must eat 1500 calories, yeah no. I am not eating 3000 calories a day I'd gain weight. When I exercise (did the stationary bike today for 30 minutes) and it said I burned 169 calories which seems accurate. I am fine with eating 1200 calories + half of my workout calories but I am not eating my steps calories too. That just seems ridiculous and I'd pretty much have to stuff my self full.
That is a crazy number. I'm going to guess your heart rate is up from the heavy lifting and that's where the error is coming in. I have had three Garmin non-HR devices and they all underestimate for me. I get less than 400 exercise calories for 10000 steps. Look up your instruction manual and see if you can turn off the HR feature. It should save you some battery life too. Back before Garmin had built in HR it was pretty common for people to anecdotally report underestimations for step tracking.
Yep, underestimates steps for me. But I know on other devices, particularly wrist read HR, they're way overstated.
I'm upgrading to the 235 soon and will do a bunch of self testing. I will likely turn off HRM for anything but purposeful exercise so the step adjustment isn't influenced by HR, I have pretty bad anxiety so don't want it giving me extra for having an anxiety attack in the supermarket!0 -
I got the foot pod because it was grossly underestimating my steps when I was hiking using poles (ie a 3 mile hike came in at 1400 steps). It seems pretty accurate with the pod. You might consider one if you want more accurate steps.0
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BootyEvolve wrote: »4legsRbetterthan2 wrote: »My experience:
I used a fitbit one for maby years (basic model only counts steps) and had my weight loss pretty closely mirror what was projected taking a deficit out of the daily calorie burns it estimated for me. I felt it was a pretty accurate device.
I recently decided to update my garmin since they are combining activity trackers into their running watches now. I tried the vivosmart hr+ first and found it gave me super crazy calorie burns when using the 24/7 hr monitoring. When I turned that off it was pretty similar to what my fitbit would have estimated.
After that I did some deeper digging and found that the hr activity trackers seems to be way over estimating calories across the board. I am pretty comfortable with the estimates based solely on steps though.
TLDR: if it is estimating off steps alone I would be ok eating them if you want. If your device is 24/7 hr monitoring be very wary of inflated calorie estimates.
Yeah mine is on 24/7 and I am not sure how to make it stop tacking on the steps calories. I think my BMR is pretty accurate (1694) but then it says with my 10,000 steps i must eat 1500 calories, yeah no. I am not eating 3000 calories a day I'd gain weight. When I exercise (did the stationary bike today for 30 minutes) and it said I burned 169 calories which seems accurate. I am fine with eating 1200 calories + half of my workout calories but I am not eating my steps calories too. That just seems ridiculous and I'd pretty much have to stuff my self full.
For me, when I turned off the 24/7hr monitoring and just used activity tracking it seemed accurate, maybe slightly less that I got with my fitbit but at least in the ball park, with HR on it was a good 600 calories over where it should have been IMO. With my FR230 (no hr monitor) it only tracks by activity and seems to be making sense.
If you want to turn off either the activity tracking of or 24/7 hr just go to the settings and click around, you should be able to find where to turn it off. Or google garmin pdf manual for your model, the online pdf manuals give you alot more info than the silly quick start guides they send you. Not sure why they don't send you the full manual with he device.
As for some of the discussion about calories between MFP and garmin:
Garmin splits calories into BMR and activity. My BMR according to Garmin is a little lower than what I tend to see from other online calculators, but only by around 100 calories so not super horrible. Looking at my data over the past 2 weeks that I have been using garmin it looks like MFP will add whatever you earn in activity calories for the day. The calorie sync btwn Garmin and MFP is a little bit odd. If you look at your calories consumed tile in garmin is basically uses your MFP goal as your BMR, not the BMR garmin uses in the calories tile. So if you want your calories for MFP to directly correlate to your calories burned for the day with Garmin I think you need to set your MFP goal to whatever Garmin's BMR is. Hopefully that made some sense, it is a little bit hard to articulate what I observed. I will admit I was more impressed with fitbit/MFP syncing and ability to adjust calories than I have been so far with Garmin, but I think it does work out if you put a little thought in it.0 -
jennifer_runs wrote: »I use a Garmin 235. It counts daily steps and I also use it to log my exercises, which get automatically sent here. However-- one error is that it sends total calories and not net, so it's over by about 50 calories per hour (keep that in mind if you have it synching automatically).
MFP will also make a "Garmin Connect Calorie Adjustment" if you want it to-- this will adjust your overall calories up or down (you can disable negative adjustments if you want) based on your daily activity (that is your steps, not your exercise). I have it doing that too.
I have my activity level set as "sedentary" as well, but the Garmin adjustment will take care of that.
ditto this. I have the same Garmin and this is how I use it. Sedentary + Garmin adjustment seems pretty on par with my what I worked out my TDEE to be anyway.0 -
I read an article that says you only eat calories burned after burning 300-500 calories during exercise. So if my Fitbit reports I burned 300 calories, I stay at 1200, but if it reports I've burned 600, I'll eat a high protein snack (think a Boca burger or a slice of cheese, maybe nuts or a protien smoothie) with a 100 calorie intake.0
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I have garmin hr, it counts steps, An runs, what ever exercise I do I go back to see what calories are on this app .. Denise0
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I just turned off my activity tracking. The only thing I care about are the exercise calories. Not step calories.0
This discussion has been closed.
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