MFP negative calorie adjustment

naturalbeautii
naturalbeautii Posts: 72 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
I need some clarification. Do any recommend to have the negative calorie adjustment enabled or disabled? Also, I have mines enable but I am seeing -246. Does this mean I need to burn more in order not see the negative number?

Replies

  • shadow2soul
    shadow2soul Posts: 7,692 Member
    I keep it enabled. This allows MFP to adjust my calories up or down based on my activity.

    The higher you set your activity level on MFP, the more it will take to actually see a positive adjustment.
    If you manually log any exercises on MFP it will also increase the activity needed to see a positive adjustment. To see a positive your trackers calorie burn would have to exceed MFPS estimated activity level burn + the additional calories from manually logged exercise. If you don’t, it will take some of those calories away.
  • naturalbeautii
    naturalbeautii Posts: 72 Member
    Thank you
  • Grnhouse
    Grnhouse Posts: 254 Member
    @shadow2soul so are you saying a negative is a bad thing?
  • shadow2soul
    shadow2soul Posts: 7,692 Member
    Grnhouse wrote: »
    @shadow2soul so are you saying a negative is a bad thing?

    No. It’s actually a good thing because it helps you keep a consistent deficit.

    Say you manually log an exercise on MFP for 500 calories.

    MFP adds that 500 to what it thought you would burn. To make this easy let’s say that is 2000.

    2000+500= 2500 calories that MFP thought you burned.

    Now let’s say your tracker estimates your total calories burned to be 2300.

    If you don’t have negative adjustments enabled your deficit will be 200 calories smaller. So:
    selected a 250 cal deficit will be a 50 cal deficit
    selected a 500 cal deficit will be a 300 cal deficit
    selected a 750 cal deficit will be a 550 cal deficit


    The end result being that you might not lose at the rate you expected or at all if you picked the smallest deficit.

    Or if enabled you could see this:

    1750+500-200= 2050 (a 250 calorie deficit from 2300)

    1500+500-200= 1800 (a 500 calorie deficit from 2300)

    1250+500-200 = 1550 (a 750 calorie deficit from 2300)

    It could also just be you had an inactive day and didn’t quite meet what MFP expected you to burn based on your activity level selection.

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