Apple Health vs Garmin steps calories

tal_nahum

Hi, I have been using MFP for 120 days now, up until now I used my iPhone to track my steps trough apple health base app .

I started using Vivosmart HR watch and installed Garmin Connect on my iphone and synced it with MyfitnessPal .


My activity is set to not very active , Myfitnesspal suggest 1800 calories a day for a loss of 0.5kg a week

up untill now everything was fine with the calories adjusment but now after calculating steps calories from my watch (wearing all the time.) see for yourself:

Garmin calories:




Apple health calories:




now ofcourse the apple health calories seems more accurate and realistic , and that's what I followed , knowing that "not very active" already has some calories burned calculated in the 1800 calories due to normal day activity, but it seems garmin does not take this into account (I have negative adjustment enabled.). the amount of bonus calories I receive from garmin seems way too high


Edit: see the time



?? whats going on? , it does the calculation by hour - daily based? so how do I know how much to eat ?

tal_nahum

can someone aid ?

aokoye

I would assume there's a difference in the number of steps the applications/devices have calculated. If the Apple Health calories are using your iPhone's pedometer for the number of steps your taking and you have that on you for less time than your Vivosmart, then it would logically give you fewer calories.

Orphia

Yes, it does a daily projection throughout the day, based on your Garmin exercise so far.

Other things to note are:

MFP also has your activity level included (not very active) so that would mean you get some extra calories assumed burnt.

I use a Garmin and have Garmin Activity Class as 0, and MFP activity level set to sedentary so extra exercise I do is added on.

Your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR - what you'd burn while in a coma) is being taken out in the MFP calories burned, but it's included in the Garmin daily calories.

tal_nahum

aokoye wrote: »

I would assume there's a difference in the number of steps the applications/devices have calculated. If the Apple Health calories are using your iPhone's pedometer for the number of steps your taking and you have that on you for less time than your Vivosmart, then it would logically give you fewer calories.

Hi, the amout of steps are the same on both devices, I ended up with 400 calories while my max was 300 on my iPhone and that's about double what iPhone gave me on average each day

Orphia wrote: »

Yes, it does a daily projection throughout the day, based on your Garmin exercise so far.

Other things to note are:

MFP also has your activity level included (not very active) so that would mean you get some extra calories assumed burnt.

I use a Garmin and have Garmin Activity Class as 0, and MFP activity level set to sedentary so extra exercise I do is added on.

Your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR - what you'd burn while in a coma) is being taken out in the MFP calories burned, but it's included in the Garmin daily calories.

I understand garmin also takes into account my hearth rate so:
is there any 3rd party calculator that MFP will use to calculate the calories?
which of the calories are correct ? , i tend to go with the iphone since after 120 days if garmin was true i would be much closer to my goal (i assume all the calories and mfp calculation are overestimated anyway so i dont take it too serious, but i do log each meal and count the calories and i want some good and accurate feedback as much as possible.)

today up till now i got -33 for 1000 steps, which seems ok , lets see how it ends up

Orphia

Since 2015 I've used iOS Health, Fitbit Charge 2, and two Garmins (Fenix 5 since 2017), and they've all been very accurate when linked to MFP and eating the number of kilojoules MFP tells me to eat. I log all my food, and for the past 3+ years I've also eaten back 95% of the exercise calories, and maintained my goal weight.

For what it's worth, I'm:
Female
Age 50-55
176 cm tall
65 kg

30 minutes of purposeful walking earns me 600 kilojoules.

Hopefully that might help you.

I wouldn't worry about a difference of 100 calories on one day. Keep an eye on it. Just make sure you're not eating too little.

Well done for asking in Community!

tal_nahum

Orphia wrote: »

Since 2015 I've used iOS Health, Fitbit Charge 2, and two Garmins (Fenix 5 since 2017), and they've all been very accurate when linked to MFP and eating the number of kilojoules MFP tells me to eat. I log all my food, and for the past 3+ years I've also eaten back 95% of the exercise calories, and maintained my goal weight.

For what it's worth, I'm:
Female
Age 50-55
176 cm tall
65 kg

30 minutes of purposeful walking earns me 600 kilojoules.

Hopefully that might help you.

I wouldn't worry about a difference of 100 calories on one day. Keep an eye on it. Just make sure you're not eating too little.

Well done for asking in Community!

Hi, thanks for ur help , I would like to learn from ur experiance one more thing , ur saying that all ur devices have been very accurate , yet iOS health and Garmin gives different results , almost double in the diffrence , so one of em must be inaccurate , as for today, I have turned off my heartbeat sensor and the calories seemed fine and almost the same as iOS , yet in the evening I went for running so i turned the heartbeat sensor on again , after I finished the exercise the calories per step (including steps while running.) was about 240 which seems OK for like 14k steps , and the running gave me another 460 calories, which seems abit too high to be honest but accepetable since i checked the innterent and it shows the same results.
then after an hour or so the calories per step jumped to impossible amout, see for urself:





yet the breakdown somehow makes sense (reminding I set my activity level to not very active):





but if you look at the calories from exercise its a complete mess:




thats very frustrating because the watch does amazing job tracking my running and steps , hearthbeat , just everything , but the calories issue, it just ruins all the experince of logging ur food and investing time in the process .

tommrow I will try to run with hearthbeat turned off unfortunately , ill see the results and determine about giving up the hearthbeat option .

maybe do u know any 3rd party app which takes all this data and counting the calories properly ? seems theres no other option

Orphia

Patience.

What were the end of the day totals like?

How did you go today?

aokoye

What do you have your "How would you describe your normal daily activities?" level set to on MFP? Also are you getting the iOS data from an Apple watch, your phone, or is Garmin pushing the steps to apple health?

tal_nahum

Orphia wrote: »

Patience.

What were the end of the day totals like?

How did you go today?

this was the end of the day total.

today I investigated further , turning my hearthbeat on again , calories are very high again about 400 per 6,500 steps.

I tried installing another app "Pacer" to act as a "middle man"



in reality , there are some problems , Garmin shows 6532 steps , and pacer shows 6596 which is okay but may vary , I used apple health sources hierarchy and placed garmin ontop , yet it reads steps from 3 different sources (iPhone , garmin and pacer) so it there are some problems with steps calculations , but its OK nothing serious.


the results:




2 things:

1.) pacer app shows 259 calories, where is MFP negative adjustment ? for example garmin shows 450 but MFP shows 400 due to negative adjustment

2.)seems better but still too high, and syncing isn't perfect, also in MFP the calories suddenly jumped to 350 + calories from pacer and I fixed it only after removing and choosing pacer again as the steps tracker on MFP.

seems to me my last option is to disable heartbeat sensor on garmin to get some normal calories calculation because pacer still seems to high (ending up 400+ for 10,000 , which would be reasonable if not taking into account the MFP goal calories already given.).

I would really want to get feedback from garmin user because im not the only one experiencing this problems , its been there for years

aokoye wrote: »

What do you have your "How would you describe your normal daily activities?" level set to on MFP? Also are you getting the iOS data from an Apple watch, your phone, or is Garmin pushing the steps to apple health?

Sedentary: Spend most of the day sitting (e.g. bank teller, desk job)

thats the nature of my job so I choosed this option , yet I take a walk often to make sure I reach 10,000 steps a day, my monthly average is 12,000 , but even after changing to "active" it sets my goal to 2400 calories instead of 1830 , even with the negative adjustment its still more calories so following that program in theory wont get me to losing weight (my plan is 0.5k a week btw.).

iOS data came from Iphone , now I started using vivosmart watch so i wont have to take my phone everywhere
notice that the problem is in "garmin connect calories burned" amout (which i cant change) and not MFP

aokoye

I highly suspect that the Garmin is correct and counting steps that you didn't realize that you've taken because I'm assuming you wear the Garmin more than you had your phone on you. There was only a 32 calorie difference between them and while yes that will add up over time, it isn't unreasonable to assume that your iPhone wasn't counting all of the steps you were taking.

The calorie adjustment from having 10k+ steps also doesn't sound unreasonable. I would just stick with using only your Garmin, not your iphone and not sending stuff from through the Pacer app (which I would assume would only work to introduce error needlessly).

And yes, I wear a Garmin FR935 and have had no issue with the way that it count steps other than it assuming that I'm walking when I'm rowing on the water (which is not applicable to your issue). If you set your level on MFP to sedentary and are getting 10k steps, you can assume that there will be a large calorie adjustment. There are a number of threads here that address that - I think a recent one was titled something along the lines of, "what do I set my activity level to?". It's something that I wish MFP was more transparent about/had more guidance on as opposed to leaving users to figure it out.

tal_nahum

aokoye wrote: »

I highly suspect that the Garmin is correct and counting steps that you didn't realize that you've taken because I'm assuming you wear the Garmin more than you had your phone on you. There was only a 32 calorie difference between them and while yes that will add up over time, it isn't unreasonable to assume that your iPhone wasn't counting all of the steps you were taking.

The calorie adjustment from having 10k+ steps also doesn't sound unreasonable. I would just stick with using only your Garmin, not your iphone and not sending stuff from through the Pacer app (which I would assume would only work to introduce error needlessly).

And yes, I wear a Garmin FR935 and have had no issue with the way that it count steps other than it assuming that I'm walking when I'm rowing on the water (which is not applicable to your issue). If you set your level on MFP to sedentary and are getting 10k steps, you can assume that there will be a large calorie adjustment. There are a number of threads here that address that - I think a recent one was titled something along the lines of, "what do I set my activity level to?". It's something that I wish MFP was more transparent about/had more guidance on as opposed to leaving users to figure it out.

its broken bud, yesterday I ran again (same exercise from above picture) without heartbeat sensor and it gave me 900 calories, ok u may think it needs heartbeat sensor on , the calories from steps was 260 for about 14k which seems reasonable taking into account the running steps and calories (not to double count) but then after an hour or so I turned the hearbeat sensor on again and it jumped 1,219 calories for 15,000 steps + 900 for running which i had to edit because it was running my MFP diary (editing handly gave me the Under Armour Endomondo tracker popup )which i will try to use



can you tell me whats ur number of calories for 10k steps? for running?

Orphia

I'm female, and today I earned 2,400 kilojoules (574 kcal) for a 10 km run (12,700 steps).

Males earn nearly twice the amount as females (grrr, not fair ).

I have MFP set to "sedentary".

MFP's steps calorie adjustment changes throughout the day.

I go running first thing in the morning. After that, I get the running activity calories, and a negative steps adjustment if I haven't also done more than about 2-3000 steps, which is the amount a sedentary person would do during a whole day.

As I do more more steps throughout the day, that negative steps adjustment changes and goes into a positive calorie bonus.

Orphia

I'd quit adding other apps like Pacer and Endomondo which just confuse the numbers to try to understand.

Try to learn what MFP and Garmin are doing.

Read the MFP Help topics. There are lots!!!!

heybales

I see some mis-information in some of the responses so far.
Just to clear up a few.

The Full Day Projection that MFP does is NOT based on your tracker given info for rest of the day.
From the time stamp until midnight is based on your MFP selected Activity level rate of burn.
And BMR calories is NOT removed from that.

That to end of day is added to your tracker info up to that point. And as the tracker keeps sharing if you are doing more or less than expected, your adjustment goes up or down.

Apple on direct sync does NOT supply what MFP is expecting per API rules, and given by other trackers.
It's expecting Total Daily Calories burned (TDEE) and time stamp - that's it for the math.
Workouts is optional, and if supplied is removed from the daily total since MFP will add them to the eating goal later.
Problem with Apple is it's giving MFP a Daily burned equal to about your Sedentary burn rate.
When workouts are sent, they aren't actually in that figure sent as it should for TDEE, which results in a removal of something never there - so no credit for the workouts actually, but negative.

In addition - daily activity above Sedentary isn't even sent over. So no actual credit for what TDEE means.

You can't sync directly with Apple if you want MFP to deal with actual figures it's coming up with.
The more active you are and the more workouts the worse the wrong adjustments go.

Pacer you used is the method to get around that issue.


Also, steps is merely used to get a distance - distance is how daily level activity calories is calculated.
HR is used if it goes above a certain level to be used for exercise. And sadly the lower part of that exercise range is more inflated for that, besides the regular reasons why HR-based calorie burns can be inaccurate.

I'd leave steps out of your process as they don't really bear on the fact distance can vary decently with same steps.

Also - that process you say of Garmin steps syncing to Apple Health - are you sure it's only a step figure, not the calories and time stamp?

When Pacer is linked to an Apple account (not just the iphone counting steps and estimating distance) - it should be pulling the info from Apple account - correct info compared to direct MFP to Apple health account.

That's why you saw the flakey 109 calories burned as of some 5pm time stamp - doesn't make sense.

And I'd agree with several above - skip the convoluted methods - just sync Garmin to MFP.
It works correctly.

If you don't like the Garmin Connect activity logging and prefer Apple Health - you should be able to sync it to both Apple and MFP, cancel the MFP to Apple health link.

heybales

To add OP - from your more detailed comments - it sounds like the Garmin may be estimating that line between daily activity and exercise in a not best place.

HR-based calorie burn is only a decent estimate for calorie burn in aerobic steady-state exercise (same HR for 2-4 min) - which walking would sure be one. (and even in that best range several reasons it can be screwed up)

But the range gets inflated on each side, right above daily activity, and right below going anaerobic.
Walking good pace can many times pop you up into that inflated range - where distance-based calorie burn would actually be better.

Also - with that many steps - you actually confirmed it's got the distance correct?
May need to adjust the stride-length to right in the middle of the possible range of walking - perhaps 2 mph.
You ever walked 1/2 to 1 mile at about 2 mph and confirmed the distance was correct?

That won't save the issue of Garmin accidentally popping into HR-based burn thinking a workout is going on, but it may still help.

Some settings in your Garmin Connect account regarding your Activity Class in User Settings can help that calorie burn accuracy.

NorthCascades

Orphia wrote: »

Yes, it does a daily projection throughout the day, based on your Garmin exercise so far.

Other things to note are:

MFP also has your activity level included (not very active) so that would mean you get some extra calories assumed burnt.

I use a Garmin and have Garmin Activity Class as 0, and MFP activity level set to sedentary so extra exercise I do is added on.

Your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR - what you'd burn while in a coma) is being taken out in the MFP calories burned, but it's included in the Garmin daily calories.

For what it's worth, Garmin says they don't use this anymore unless you're using a really old device. The newer ones use the activity history they record for you instead.

heybales

NorthCascades wrote: »

Orphia wrote: »

Yes, it does a daily projection throughout the day, based on your Garmin exercise so far.

Other things to note are:

MFP also has your activity level included (not very active) so that would mean you get some extra calories assumed burnt.

I use a Garmin and have Garmin Activity Class as 0, and MFP activity level set to sedentary so extra exercise I do is added on.

Your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR - what you'd burn while in a coma) is being taken out in the MFP calories burned, but it's included in the Garmin daily calories.

For what it's worth, Garmin says they don't use this anymore unless you're using a really old device. The newer ones use the activity history they record for you instead.

Thanks for that reminder, I forgot they changed that, actually I guess many years ago when it disappeared from device options. Guess who had an older device beyond that point, hosed up system prevented the firmware upgrade for a long time.