Exercise calories earned from steps

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missuswife
missuswife Posts: 26 Member
in Getting Started
I wear an Apple Watch and typically average 10000 steps a day just moving around the house taking care of my three kids. I walked 10,175 steps today and MFP says I earned 36 calories. Is that accurate? My watch says I burned 673 calories. That’s a huge discrepancy and I don’t want to eat any exercise cals until I sort this out.

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  • Shortgirlrunning
    Shortgirlrunning Posts: 1,020 Member
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    What is your activity level set to on MFP? If it’s set to a higher activity level then it’s already giving you those step calories at the start of every day. That would be my guess for the big disparity
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 13,682 Member
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    Has your apple watch been synchronizing regularly with mfp? what adjustment have you been getting on average for your 10K steps? Is this a new connection?

    If it is not a new connection, use your historical data for your decision making.

    If this is a new connection: There have been multiple anecdotal reports of people posting on the forums about exercise not crediting correctly when apple watch is connected directly to MFP.

    Whether this has been fixed recently, that I do not know. disconnecting apple from MFP and then connecting apple to Pacer and Pacer to MFP, utilizing Pacer or a similar app as intermediary has worked in the past.
  • missuswife
    missuswife Posts: 26 Member
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    I used to earn maybe 300 calories per day, and then I disconnected my watch from MFP for a few months to try Noom. I just reconnected my watch to MFP today (and disconnected from Noom) through the Health app on my phone.
  • missuswife
    missuswife Posts: 26 Member
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    Shortgirlrunning wrote: »
    What is your activity level set to on MFP? If it’s set to a higher activity level then it’s already giving you those step calories at the start of every day. That would be my guess for the big disparity

    I’m set to “lightly active.” I’m a single SAHM with 5 year old twins and a 7 year old so I never get to sit down. I’m getting 9k-10k steps per day but they’re not like, exercise, if you know what I mean.
  • janejellyroll
    janejellyroll Posts: 25,763 Member
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    missuswife wrote: »
    Shortgirlrunning wrote: »
    What is your activity level set to on MFP? If it’s set to a higher activity level then it’s already giving you those step calories at the start of every day. That would be my guess for the big disparity

    I’m set to “lightly active.” I’m a single SAHM with 5 year old twins and a 7 year old so I never get to sit down. I’m getting 9k-10k steps per day but they’re not like, exercise, if you know what I mean.

    The reason why your adjustment is only 36 calories is that some of your steps are already included in the "lightly active" movement that MFP assumed for you when you made that selection. This is to prevent double-counting.
  • cwolfman13
    cwolfman13 Posts: 41,874 Member
    edited May 2020
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    missuswife wrote: »
    Shortgirlrunning wrote: »
    What is your activity level set to on MFP? If it’s set to a higher activity level then it’s already giving you those step calories at the start of every day. That would be my guess for the big disparity

    I’m set to “lightly active.” I’m a single SAHM with 5 year old twins and a 7 year old so I never get to sit down. I’m getting 9k-10k steps per day but they’re not like, exercise, if you know what I mean.

    You only get a calorie adjustment for activity that is beyond what you have set in MFP. Your activity level in MFP is already going to give you calories to account for a certain number of steps...even a setting of sedentary is going to account for about 5,000 steps taken in a day.

    I believe light active accounts for somewhere in the neighborhood of 8,000 steps, so you're getting credited for a couple thousand more steps than what your activity level is set to, thus it won't be a particularly large adjustment. I can't say whether 36 is too low of an adjustment or not, but it seems reasonable enough for a couple thousand more steps than what your activity level is set to. You certainly shouldn't be expecting an adjustment of hundreds of calories though given you activity level setting.

    That said, Apple has been known not to play well with others, including MFP...you should perhaps be credited for more, but it wouldn't be substantially more, and given the imprecise nature of calorie counting, I'd probably just stick with that and not eat back any calories from steps and only from deliberate, more intense exercise/training activity that requires recovery fuel unless your steps substantially exceed your activity level.

    Unless I was doing a crazy amount of walking and whatnot, I always just thought of some additional steps as a bit of a bonus as I was also set to light active when I was using MFPs method.
  • missuswife
    missuswife Posts: 26 Member
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    Thanks for the replies. Maybe this is why Noom wasn’t working well for me, it was giving me loads of calories for my steps.
  • heybales
    heybales Posts: 18,842 Member
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    That would have been correct on their part if your activity level was set lower, or their math led to a smaller daily burn.

    That many steps is frankly above Lightly-Active anyway - if there is any real distance to them.

    But the MFP app using a device as step source only is a very rough estimate.

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