MFP and Samsung Galaxy Active 2 Watch

patriotdavid

Hey All,

My apologies if this is the wrong board but here goes....

Ive been using MFP for about 3 months and have it synced up with my Samsung Active 2 watch. When i have MFP set to read my workouts on my watch, the Samsung Health Calorie Adjustment gets all wonky and in my diary the "Exercise" is in the negative. I've included a screenshot below. Is this a bug or am i just doing something wrong?

Thanks in advance!
Dave

patriotdavid

heybales

Redo just the exercise tab ones for most recent data, don't need the food goal screen.

Exercise diary pic. then...
Press and hold on the calorie adjustment for more details and pic there too.

And then comment if your Samsung account agrees with the total calorie burn at the time stamp you see on details screen.
Just in case Samsung sending bad info, or confirming if MFP did something wrong with what was sent.

Did you create the workout on MFP - or did Samsung send that over?

patriotdavid

Ok...I'm not sure exactly what you're asking, but i did some adjustments on MFP. I turned off calculating neg calorie adjustments. And when i set up the Samsung Health app, its just set to read and write my exercises onto MFP which are the correct numbers. But now it's not accounting for calories burned from the steps i did for the day. All it says is 0. Should i not get credit for calories burned from the steps ive taken for the day? Again, I'm kinda confused with what you're asking above but maybe i just don't understand how MFP and the Samsung Health app work together!

heybales

You already took one of the pics.

All that was asked for was doing that pic again - and then perhaps you hadn't noticed that you can press and hold on the Calorie Adjustment line and get more details.
A pic of that page too.

Just do that first. Then you can understand what is to happen.

patriotdavid

Ok so i've been fiddling with MFP and Samsung Health and now this is what i'm seeing in my diary...as you can see below, it now doesn't account for calories burned with the steps i've done throughout the day. Any advice would be great! Thanks1

patriotdavid

So if i got it right, i should be getting a calorie adjustment of 3035 - 2886 = 149 calories. Correct???

heybales

So MFP is estimating daily burn with no exercise as 2446 (that's the 2886-440 included exercise).

It knows you got 266 calories from steps (very rough estimate to that math) above your expected based on activity level at 7:05 pm and any exercise it knows about.

With known exercise being 440 cal, and only 266 more than expected, your daily burn at that point was actually 266-440 = neg 174 below expected for activity level.

So you might say your activity level was less than expected if you left the workout out of it so far.
With the workout burning 440, you have now come above your expected level by 266 calories.

But since MFP would be taking your base eating goal and adding on exercise and the adjustment, it can't add it back in first or it would be double counting.
Your base eating goal is 2460 - I'm guessing you haven't had your eating goal adjusted for losing weight. It should be the 2446 for eating at maintenance you appear to be set for.
And since set for maintenance, it's not going below your desired figure.

base goal 2460 - 174 adj + 440 workout = 2726

But you don't have negative calorie adjustments enabled - so you get the full 440.
2460 + 440 = 2900

So here's the problem with using MFP app and selecting a phone as a step source.
It doesn't know when those steps took place (it also doesn't know distance and therefore not a good estimate of calorie burn either), and if those steps were actually a part of the logged workout.
So if you had steps getting you above the activity level and then a workout logged - you lose them.

In this case though - your steps didn't seem to indicate you even had reached the set activity level yet, you needed 174 more calories worth of steps to reach it.
You didn't have negative adj enabled.
And I think with maintenance setting - it was going to remove any anyway.

project_shan

I have this same issue. When I had negative adjustments enabled, the more exercise I did the bigger the negative adjustment was. Didn't seem logical to me so I went ahead and just disabled it. Now, my Samsung watch only sends over any exercise, and not my daily steps, which are recorded as zero like in the post above. I have MFP set as sedentary, and this would happen even if I did 15000 steps - a bigger Negative adjustment. Bizarre.

patriotdavid

Thanks heybales.....after reading your reply a few times ( i think?!) i'm starting to understand how this all works. Yesterday was a low day for steps for sure as I've consistently been reaching about 10 000 steps per day over the past few weeks up until then. I do have MFP set to maintenance now as over the past 3 months i've lost quite a bit of weight due to eating clean, yoga, walks n runs (up until last week i had it set to lose weight). I've always been confused with all this negative calorie adjustment stuff so i didn't have it enabled (I now switched and have neg calorie adjustments enabled)...but at least i know now its not a software bug with either MFP or Samsung Health.

Anyways, I appreciate the explanation. Sounds like you have a PhD in Mathematics! Eventho its a bit over my head I'm still glad that I have MFP to track my food intake and workouts.

heybales

project_shan wrote: »

I have this same issue. When I had negative adjustments enabled, the more exercise I did the bigger the negative adjustment was. Didn't seem logical to me so I went ahead and just disabled it. Now, my Samsung watch only sends over any exercise, and not my daily steps, which are recorded as zero like in the post above. I have MFP set as sedentary, and this would happen even if I did 15000 steps - a bigger Negative adjustment. Bizarre.

Well now you have me wondering if they changed what they sent, and my math above is wrong now.

Because that sounds more like the Apple issue.
Apple sends what is supposed to be a total daily burn figure (TDEE).
MFP to keep from double-dipping subtracts any workouts it knows about, and Apple does send workouts over.
That should result in a calorie burn of daily activity to see if you did more than activity level.
Take the base eating goal, add in calories above activity level, and the known workout - and there's your new eating goal. Same deficit.

But Apple actually sends instead of TDEE, a figure close to Sedentary, so it doesn't contain the workouts, or extra activity.
For workouts then they are subtracted from figure they aren't in. But at least they are added back to eating goal, so no net change, deficit just increased by size of workout.
And no info on extra calorie burn is accounted for at all.

It's sounding the same then.
But the above screen shots don't show SH sending a daily burn figure at all. That shows MFP app using device for counting steps only.
Did your SH back when you synced showing a TDEE figure?

heybales

patriotdavid wrote: »

Thanks heybales.....after reading your reply a few times ( i think?!) i'm starting to understand how this all works. Yesterday was a low day for steps for sure as I've consistently been reaching about 10 000 steps per day over the past few weeks up until then. I do have MFP set to maintenance now as over the past 3 months i've lost quite a bit of weight due to eating clean, yoga, walks n runs (up until last week i had it set to lose weight). I've always been confused with all this negative calorie adjustment stuff so i didn't have it enabled (I now switched and have neg calorie adjustments enabled)...but at least i know now its not a software bug with either MFP or Samsung Health.

Anyways, I appreciate the explanation. Sounds like you have a PhD in Mathematics! Eventho its a bit over my head I'm still glad that I have MFP to track my food intake and workouts.

All negative adj allows to happen is keeping the deficit the same even if you happen to go below your activity level calories.
Unless - this causes going below 1200 women and 1500 men - then the size of the negative is reduced so end eating goal stays above those numbers.

Some people though know they better be eating say 1800 or it messes up their day, so even if they are less active - they'd rather have less deficit and still eat the 1800.
They would disable neg adj.

If you could go back to one of your completed more active days and get the same 2 screen shots, I'm curious now with proj_shan comments if SH changed their methodology, or perhaps there is a bug screwing up the numbers currently. At first glance what you showed is what I was expecting (with the extra confusion of neg adj being disabled and at maintenance - don't see that often).

patriotdavid

soooo...when i changed my settings to enable negative calorie adjustments, this is what happens on MFP to my previous days calculations.....

I'm not sure whats going on but i really think this is a bug between my phone (Samsung A8), MFP and SH. Anyways, i don't have enable negative calorie adjustments on anymore. I'm not sure whatelse i can do

heybales

That setting for prior days doesn't work anyway - so no loss there.

But that effect you show is a known bug I believe - multiple workouts logged.
Interesting if you found out what kicks the bug off.

The neg adj setting is purely for math - actually no settings are sent back to a 3rd party device unless they ask for for the few stats that are available - Garmin asks for the eating goal, but it doesn't get the adjusted goal after math is done, only the base eating goal.

So when you changed the setting - did the other workouts disappear or did you have to delete them?

Even with a working Garmin and prior Fitbit under most situations - it was possible to get the right combo of changes to leave MFP screwed up.

Like right now a corrected workout on Garmin for calorie change won't come across and update the workout already synced to MFP.
Not sure if Garmin even sends that info, or only new workouts.
Garmin also takes awhile to update it's only daily calorie burn when you change that workout - so it may not come over to MFP as updated, leaving the math wrong again.

So there are some basics for the way stuff is supposed to happen.
There are known bugs.
And then there are strange things depending on the 3rd party method of working.

Appears like the steps changed to if that is a matching day.

patriotdavid

When i changed the setting it stayed the same (actually i think another of the same 440 calorie work out was added). In any case, it's been pretty stable for the past couple days now. When i do a work out, it just adds it once. The steps and calorie adjustment are tracked up until i do a workout. Then the calorie adjustment is 0 depending if my workout was intense enough. I suppose this is what it's suppose to do so that i'm not getting double credit for calories burned? Again, thx for the input heybales

patriotdavid

Also, just to answer your question i didn't delete the multiple workouts on the previous day (May 21). I just left it. Not only did it add the same multiple workout on May 21 but it did on every day before too and it's just a pain in the *kitten* to delete them all. Frustrating.....

heybales

LOL - sounds like you have a huge holiday dinner coming up!
Gotta make up for lost days.
I'm guessing it's so far back you just don't recall doing all those workouts. Ah memory.

Curious - does Samsung Health account know about any of the MFP settings like your eating goal, or does it know about a base daily calorie burn level?

I'm wondering if the Samsung account is setup like Garmin - it does request some extra info to do it's own math and goals with.

And when you changed something on MFP side, MFP just auto-sent say a new eating goal for that day.
Samsung saw it and just auto-sent everything for the day.

Every once in awhile people will comment on multiple Garmin workouts syncing over - now you got me wondering.
Maybe I'll test - though I hate screwing up my account and past data.

patriotdavid

Ya no kidding, on my previous days it shows that I have like 30 000 - 40 000 calories remaining... Even more... It looks crazy. With that too I've found my MFP is slower loading up on my phone.. I'm guessing cuz of all the additional workouts it's added to the previous days. Anyways, the other day I made sure all my goals are the same, weight, height all that stuff. SH is set to level two which is "somewhat active". I set MFP to the same level although it calls it something else. It seems to be ok now. Either way I'm happy I'm not gonna sweat the small stuff. As long as I can keep track and maintain my current weight I'll be fine. Now I'm just gonna go eat that carrot Cake With Cream cheese icing to make up for all the calories I lost those past weeks 😜