Extra calories

kevhume101

MFP is giving me extra earned calories and i cant get my head around them. Ive done 2 activities today on garmin connect for around 450 calories total, then MFP is giving me an extra 700+ as extra.

Have i set something up wrong?

heybales

You may have 2 workouts - but you also have daily activity that is probably greater than what you set MFP up for.

So perhaps you selected Sedentary on MFP as your daily non-exercise activity level. Right, wrong, or unknown.

So now Garmin has seen you be much more active than Sedentary in your daily activity, as well as 2 workouts.
So it sends a daily calorie burn to MFP of let's say 2500.

MFP estimated you'd burn say 1750 at Sedentary which obviously isn't correct.
It knows about 2 workouts now that Garmin sent for 450 calories.
So MFP is expecting your daily burn to be 2200 now.

But Garmin reported you burned 2500 actually - so you had 300 calories in extra activity even.

If you had selected say the exact right activity level from the start (only 4 to select from though, Garmin can report like 1000 levels right?) - there would be no 300 extra.
MFP would have started out estimating you'd burn 2050 right from the start. Subtracted a deficit for weight loss and given an eating goal.
And with 2 workouts being 450, total burn 2500.

And you'd have no adjustment except the workouts as you expected.

See, you merely need to eat less than you burn IN TOTAL.
MFP made an estimate of what that might be based on YOUR selected activity level, and no exercise.
Now Garmin has informed MFP your selection was low, and there are workouts.

If you somehow could have nailed it on the head during setup - there'd be no adjustment.
Instead you estimate low, and correct it up as you actually do more.
Better than estimating high, and correcting it down after you may have already eaten the high estimate.