Changing calorie counts in MFP

jmf552

MFP is a great application, except that I find their calculations for weight loss calories and exercise calories are way off for me. I used the app for a while and stayed within goals for one pound a week weight loss and I actually gained weight. So I did some research. The calorie recommendation MFP gives me for losing a pound a week is actually a little higher than my BMR, both according to an online calculator and a smart scale I have that not only measures weight, but a bunch of other body mass measurements. Those two sources agree within 10 calories, but are way off from MFP.

Also, I got a Polar HR monitor and it says my calorie burn during my martial arts classes is about half what MFP estimates. So I have been manually changing the MFP estimates every day and now I am losing about 1.8 pounds a week.

So what is the best way to handle this in the app? The way I am doing it, changing the calories every day, or are there some "hacks" for this situation? It would be nice if I could just change the calorie estimates for weight loss and exercise in some settings and have them be on track every day instead of manually changing them. Thanks.

AnnPT77

You can change your base calorie goal by setting it manually to whatever base value you prefer.

If your Polar device will track all day calories and sync with MFP, and you're finding it pretty accurate, synch it (with negative calories enabled).

If it won't do that, or you don't want to do that, you can create your own exercise entry (entries) in MFP, and log your exercise using those. That won't be exactly exact, but MFP does use your initial data when you create the exercise to guess a scaled calorie value when you log the same exercise for a different number of minutes, or when at a different body weight. That won't agree exactly with your Polar, but it'll be closer, probably. Whether it's close enough for you, or you need to keep editing the exercise calories when you do the exercise, is something you need to decide based on what you see.

Personally, I set my base calorie goal manually based on my almost 7 years of logging experience (now maintaining); the setting is quite different from what MFP would estimate for me to maintain. (I can eat hundreds of calories more than MFP estimates.) For most of my exercises, I use custom exercises I created, but I do type in the number of calories I've estimated in other ways each time. (I use my Garmin to estimate some exercises, use the ExRx calculator for walking, blah blah blah. I don't synch my Garmin because it, too, guesses my all day calorie burn stupid-low compared to reality.)

Any device or calculator is just estimating. Sometimes one method vs. another works better for a particular person. Sometimes only experience works, because while most of us are close to average, a few of us can be pretty far off average, not necessarily for obvious reasons.

yirara

Also one thing to keep in mind: over what period did you gain weight and how often do you weigh yourself? If it was just a fairly short period of time it might very well have been just normal water and poop weight fluctuation.