Apple Watch exercise calories

AmberGebell

I am very confused, I have an Apple Watch that I am using in Conjunction with MFP, I did 30 minutes of cardio yesterday and had a total step count of 19,000. I have set my activity level on MFP to “ not very active” and am just eating back the calories that Apple Watch and MFP give me Which was only 100. How is that possible with close to 20,000 steps??? I used to have a Fitbit and it granted me a lot more than that, hopefully someone can shed some light

AmberGebell

Does anyone have insight?

audreypawdrey

Did you record your exercise while doing the cardio? I forget to do that sometimes, and it doesn’t “count” on the activity/calorie wheel.

shadow2soul

AmberGebell wrote: »

Does anyone have insight?

I also switched from Fitbit to Apple.

Apple and MFP don’t play nice together. Apple will send over some of it’s workout logs, but not all. It also doesn’t send MFP your Total Daily calories burned or even your Total Active calories. I have yet to figure out where it comes up with the calories in the adjustment section.

So the problem becomes that if you have an active day that doesn’t include workouts that sync over you will see little to no adjustment.

MFP is the only app that I have found to have this issue.

I am currently using another logging app for this reason. The one I am using sees both my resting and active calories from Apple Watch and only gives me bonus calories when the combined total exceeds 1918. Basically it’s doing what MFP should be doing.


Edit:
I am seeing more of my workouts transfer over the past couple days. Some that back in January didn’t come over. It’s just labeling it as an Apple Health Workout on MFP. That said the adjustment section is still weird. I lost 53 calories yesterday based on “7 calories burned as of 11:59pm”. Definitely confused on that one. That said I did get credit for both my workouts yesterday which is unusual. Not that I’m complaining. Looks like they might be trying to fix it.

MelanieCN77

If you do a workout you have to tell the AW when you start and finish.

shadow2soul

MelanieCN77 wrote: »

If you do a workout you have to tell the AW when you start and finish.

True, but it’s also important to note that not all Apples workout options sync over. Up until this past Tuesday if I marked anything as cross training or core training they wouldn’t show up on MFP and my regular adjustment wouldn’t account for them. For some reason on Tuesday I started seeing those come over as “Apple Health Workout”, but I can’t say for sure if it’s going to keep up or not. Most of the time I’ve had my watch, most of my workouts have not been sent over.

cheryldumais

I'm 5'5" tall & 148 lbs. give or take (sedentary) and get about 10,000 steps a day. MFP usually gives me around 100 calories for that. Don't know if that's any help but when I was 235 pounds I got about double that. If you are very light that might be why.

jdhcm2006

You'll probably have to log your exercise into MFP yourself. Normally, MFP will show that I do elliptical, walking, running, but it won't show dance, yoga, or stretching. However, on Monday it didn't pull over my elliptical workout, but on Tuesday it pulled over my elliptical workout AND my dance workout. I've had my Apple watch for almost two years and in that entire time, it's never pulled over my dance workouts. So I don't know why it randomly did it on Tuesday.

Maxxitt

It's wonky, no two ways about it. Unless I set a particular exercise in AW or in my other exercise app, extra "activity" calories never accrue regularly, even though my MFP stat is set with "sedentary." I'm a creature of habit and over several months figured out my TDEE without gym workouts and set my daily calorie allotment relative to that, and then on days that I am at the Y I add 150-200 calories extra. In comparing what the Health app counts as calorie expenditure and what MFP imports as calories-in, AW is apparently under-estimating my TDEE a bit. In the FITiv app that I use, TDEE is over-estimated a bit (probably because it uses heart rate to estimate and that is not accurate for calorie burn purposes, really). I'm a fan of using my own data

MelanieCN77

shadow2soul wrote: »

MelanieCN77 wrote: »

If you do a workout you have to tell the AW when you start and finish.

True, but it’s also important to note that not all Apples workout options sync over. Up until this past Tuesday if I marked anything as cross training or core training they wouldn’t show up on MFP and my regular adjustment wouldn’t account for them. For some reason on Tuesday I started seeing those come over as “Apple Health Workout”, but I can’t say for sure if it’s going to keep up or not. Most of the time I’ve had my watch, most of my workouts have not been sent over.

I get conflicted about contributing to these threads. I have AW and have got so tired of saying the same stuff over and over especially when it seems like it manages to not work with MFP in a different way every week. OP's best option is to read everything she can search up here and just play around with it all.

shadow2soul

cheryldumais wrote: »

I'm 5'5" tall & 148 lbs. give or take (sedentary) and get about 10,000 steps a day. MFP usually gives me around 100 calories for that. Don't know if that's any help but when I was 235 pounds I got about double that. If you are very light that might be why.

That seems really low for 10,000 steps. In comparison 10,000 steps for me usually gets me a 200-300 at least from Fitbit. For me though Fitbit’s estimate of my TDEE was pretty close to accurate and it adjusted MFP accordingly.

Apple Watch gives me a similar TDEE estimate, but the adjustments on MFP don’t match it. If I ate according to them I’d have days were my deficit would be over 1000 calories.

cheryldumais

shadow2soul wrote: »

cheryldumais wrote: »

I'm 5'5" tall & 148 lbs. give or take (sedentary) and get about 10,000 steps a day. MFP usually gives me around 100 calories for that. Don't know if that's any help but when I was 235 pounds I got about double that. If you are very light that might be why.

That seems really low for 10,000 steps. In comparison 10,000 steps for me usually gets me a 200-300 at least from Fitbit. For me though Fitbit’s estimate of my TDEE was pretty close to accurate and it adjusted MFP accordingly.

Apple Watch gives me a similar TDEE estimate, but the adjustments on MFP don’t match it. If I ate according to them I’d have days were my deficit would be over 1000 calories.

Perhaps I should also mention I am 62 years old, lol. I maintain around 1300 - 1400 calories/day. Youth has its advantages.

amyepdx

cheryldumais wrote: »

shadow2soul wrote: »

cheryldumais wrote: »

I'm 5'5" tall & 148 lbs. give or take (sedentary) and get about 10,000 steps a day. MFP usually gives me around 100 calories for that. Don't know if that's any help but when I was 235 pounds I got about double that. If you are very light that might be why.

That seems really low for 10,000 steps. In comparison 10,000 steps for me usually gets me a 200-300 at least from Fitbit. For me though Fitbit’s estimate of my TDEE was pretty close to accurate and it adjusted MFP accordingly.

Apple Watch gives me a similar TDEE estimate, but the adjustments on MFP don’t match it. If I ate according to them I’d have days were my deficit would be over 1000 calories.

Perhaps I should also mention I am 62 years old, lol. I maintain around 1300 - 1400 calories/day. Youth has its advantages.

I’ve noticed that it also depends on over what period of time you get your steps in.
I get a totally different adjustment if, say, I do 6000 steps over the course of my 12 hour day (average) compared to a 6000 step (3 miles or so) walk in an hour.

heybales

Don't even bother trying to do the math because Apple doesn't send the required info - total calories burned.
You can do it to see what is going wrong - but the more active you are, or more workouts - the worse the effect.

Total means total to MFP, extra activity and workouts - as every other tracker sends and MFP API's say to send.
Apple doesn't, and MFP was probably so thrilled after years to finally have them do something - they either said fine, or apple said that's it.

You have to use something like Pacer app to sync with Apple Health, and then with MFP - to get the correct values to MFP to do the math with.

Only solution to keep them synced.


If all the workouts aren't coming over, that's another matter.
If the start/end time is off the daily burn should still be the same, the extra calories just won't be counted as workout, but extra activity. The effective increase to MFP would be the same - if it sent it correctly.

n1ckolas

Will_Workout_for_food wrote: »

Heres an example of my week. What i do is add the resting + active together. From that total, set the deficit ( in my case around 2-300) so my mfp is set to around 2300 because i burn a minimum of 2600 cals a day ( average )

This is the way I use my Apple Watch. I think it's great for getting a pretty accurate view of your TDEE. Yay actual data and not a calculator estimate!!!

I use the TDEE (Active Energy + Resting Energy) week by week and calculate my calorie deficit from this number. I have found this to be spot on for my weight loss goal over the last three months.

acerocknut

I wear both apple watch and fitbit. Its so dissapointing that the apple watch does not sync. I dont usually log my workouts but my active calories is set to 1300, which usually translates to around 15000 steps. So when i let mfp use fitbit, i get more calories but apple watch may let me eat another carrot stick or two.

laurierunrun

heybales wrote: »

Don't even bother trying to do the math because Apple doesn't send the required info - total calories burned.
You can do it to see what is going wrong - but the more active you are, or more workouts - the worse the effect.

Total means total to MFP, extra activity and workouts - as every other tracker sends and MFP API's say to send.
Apple doesn't, and MFP was probably so thrilled after years to finally have them do something - they either said fine, or apple said that's it.

You have to use something like Pacer app to sync with Apple Health, and then with MFP - to get the correct values to MFP to do the math with.

Only solution to keep them synced.


If all the workouts aren't coming over, that's another matter.
If the start/end time is off the daily burn should still be the same, the extra calories just won't be counted as workout, but extra activity. The effective increase to MFP would be the same - if it sent it correctly.

You are a genius- thank you! Just got Pacer up and running and it's sorted all the data out.

heybales

laurierunrun wrote: »

heybales wrote: »

Don't even bother trying to do the math because Apple doesn't send the required info - total calories burned.
You can do it to see what is going wrong - but the more active you are, or more workouts - the worse the effect.

Total means total to MFP, extra activity and workouts - as every other tracker sends and MFP API's say to send.
Apple doesn't, and MFP was probably so thrilled after years to finally have them do something - they either said fine, or apple said that's it.

You have to use something like Pacer app to sync with Apple Health, and then with MFP - to get the correct values to MFP to do the math with.

Only solution to keep them synced.


If all the workouts aren't coming over, that's another matter.
If the start/end time is off the daily burn should still be the same, the extra calories just won't be counted as workout, but extra activity. The effective increase to MFP would be the same - if it sent it correctly.

You are a genius- thank you! Just got Pacer up and running and it's sorted all the data out.

Oh, I only figured out the bases for the problem - someone else had tried Pacer and seen how much better it worked.

But you should get the MFP Adjustment that should be about the same as your extra Move calories.
And the workouts that are synced over.