We are pleased to announce that as of March 4, 2025, an updated Rich Text Editor has been introduced in the MyFitnessPal Community. To learn more about the changes, please click here. We look forward to sharing this new feature with you!

Garmin Connect calorie adjustment. Stress = exercise?

bjdw_1977
bjdw_1977 Posts: 442 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
I've just started using this feature and I've done very little exercise the last two days but have had some times of elevated heart rate because of stress or excitement. I think this thing might be awarding me calories when I'm sitting on my butt.

Replies

  • Lietchi
    Lietchi Posts: 7,023 Member
    What was your calorie adjustment and how many steps did you take? And what activity level on MFP?

    In my experience, it seems to give extra calories for a higher heat rate combined with movement (any movement, not just exercise, for example walking around the house), not just stress/excitement and sitting still. It can inflate calorie burns that way. In my case, it all seems to even out in the end - I've always eaten my entire calorie adjustment and lost as expected.

    Ultimately, it's your results that will prove if the adjustment is accurate or not for you. Follow it for 6 to 8 weeks. Then compare your expected weight loss to your actual weight loss. If you're losing more slowly than expected, eat back less ; if you're losing more quickly, eat more.
  • bjdw_1977
    bjdw_1977 Posts: 442 Member
    Yep, I've only just started logging and weighing myself again after a long time off (and 20kg gained, I guess I'm in this for life). I'll certainly be keeping an eye on it the next couple months.
  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 10,256 Member
    Look at the app under calories: there’s a bubble for resting and for active calories. The resting one is very close to the same every day. The active one is the one you should look here
  • heybales
    heybales Posts: 18,842 Member
    HR is not used for non-exercise daily activity calories - steps and the distance those cause are, because distance and mass are very accurate calorie burn formula.

    So you are likely just more active than you told MFP you were. Which is great. If MFP had 1000's of levels and you selected the right one, you'd have no adjustment.

    Same deficit though.

    You can look at daily graph of activity and see if you have set Garmin to auto-create exercise. But it should have started it on the device and moved to per-second logging of HR then. So it should stand out.

    You can tap and hold on that MFP adjustment to see more details on it, the Garmin time of sync and total calories at the time.

    But Garmin will show what made up those total calories, if exercise included.
    High HR would not have shown up in graph as higher calorie burn.

Categories