New Apple Watch user here. Do you trust it?

LiveOnceBeHappy

I made it to my goal weight and need to maintain. So I bought an Apple Watch. I lost 53 lbs without using any of my activity calories. But now I really don't want to lose more.

So, do you "eat back" the calories that the Apple Watch gives you? Do you eat half? If you eat half, do you just do that in your head (no automated adjustment factor setting or whatever)? I feel anxious as losing the weight was a bit of a commitment, and I never, ever want to do it again. :-)

Thanks for any help or suggestions.

FWIW, I set my rings to 400 calories, 30 minutes of exercise, and 12 hours.

csplatt

It's trial and error. Why don't you start by eating half of them back, and if six weeks in you aren't happy with progress, cut back more? If six weeks in you're miserable or losing too quickly, eat them all back?

Lietchi

Weight loss is about 3500kcal per lb. So you can try to do some math yourself? Trackers give estimates, which may or may not be correct. The best basis is your own data i.e. your own weight loss rate, which will tell you on average how much more you should eat.
Even that is a bit of an experiment though, some people find that increasing their intake speeds up their metabolism a bit, so they need to readjust several times.

I eat all the calories my watch gives me and around 200kcal extra, that's what my own data has taught me.

mrmota70

I always make it a point to eat my calories back. It's a fairly decent guesstimate for the most part. Look at it this way. How accurate is your logging? We do what we can, but sometimes we have to guess. I'm closing in on 900 days logged in. So for me it has worked. I'm already at a low enough daily cal intake so don't want to drop drastically any more so yeah I'll eat back and may even go past my set daily cal on occasion. I still loose a half lb. to a lb. some weeks. Some weeks I loose nothing or I may go up a lb. In the next few months I'll hit maintenance and then I'll work on packing on 5-10lbs of muscle.

panda4153

I have found it to be super accurate, for years now I have kept a spreadsheet with my calorie intake and my total calories burned each day that I get from my watch, and my weightI gain or lose within a tenth of of a pound each month as compared to what the math from my spreadsheet says it should be. This has been true month over month for 4 years now

LiveOnceBeHappy

panda4153 wrote: »

I have found it to be super accurate, for years now I have kept a spreadsheet with my calorie intake and my total calories burned each day that I get from my watch, and my weightI gain or lose within a tenth of of a pound each month as compared to what the math from my spreadsheet says it should be. This has been true month over month for 4 years now

Can I ask a question? So, my watch says I burned 421 calories (out of the 400 I set for a goal) in the Move (red) category. I have 61/30 minutes of Exercise (green) also. So, why is MFP pulling in 206 calories for exercise? Is that from the 61/30 minutes of Exercise and ignores the Move?

I feel like I need a decoder ring to understand this!

AnnPT77

LiveOnceBeHappy wrote: »

panda4153 wrote: »

I have found it to be super accurate, for years now I have kept a spreadsheet with my calorie intake and my total calories burned each day that I get from my watch, and my weightI gain or lose within a tenth of of a pound each month as compared to what the math from my spreadsheet says it should be. This has been true month over month for 4 years now

Can I ask a question? So, my watch says I burned 421 calories (out of the 400 I set for a goal) in the Move (red) category. I have 61/30 minutes of Exercise (green) also. So, why is MFP pulling in 206 calories for exercise? Is that from the 61/30 minutes of Exercise and ignores the Move?

I feel like I need a decoder ring to understand this!

Oversimplifying, the adjustment is the reconciliation between the number of calories MFP expects you to burn (based on what you put in your profile) versus the number of calories the tracker estimates you burn all day from all activities, exercise and otherwise.

Let's say MFP estimates your BMR at 1500 (just for simplicity, not real), and your activity level makes it use a multiplier of 1.5 to estimate your calorie needs before exercise, so it thinks your pre-exercise maintenance calories are 2250. Then the tracker sees you do stuff all day (exercise, steps, anything else it can estimate), and estimates you burned 2500 calories, based on the profile settings it has, and let's pretend 400 of that was exercise calories.

By end of day, I'd expect an adjustment of 250, the difference between MFP's expectation, and the tracker's estimate. If you're set for a calorie deficit, the 250 gets added to your deficit calorie goal, to keep your same weight loss rate. If you're set for maintenance, it gets added to your maintenance calories (in your MFP goal).

If there are adjustments periodically during the day, some of those could be misleading, because there's potentially algorithmic guessing in there about how you'll spend the balance of the day.

As far as whether to trust a tracker, maybe think of it this way: The tracker is estimating. It can't measure calories. It measures things that correlate more or less well with calorie burn, then estimates calories, using its measurements plus the data you put in your profile on the tracker.

The assumptions and data used to make these estimates generally come from research studies on large groups of people. Essentially, oversimplifying a little, the tracker is spitting out a statistical estimate that amounts to the average calorie expenditure for people who are like you in the limited data values the tracker knows about you (age, weight, etc.), and who do the activities it thinks you did.

Therefore, one way to look at this is not "is the tracker accurate?" but more like "how average am I?" The specific "non-averageness" may not be obvious.

My tracker (not Apple, doesn't matter what) is very inaccurate for me on all-day calorie estimates, like 25-30% off. The same brand/model - per reports from others here - is pretty darned close for a lot of other people. My conclusion is not that the tracker is bad/inaccurate, but more that I'm somehow not very average. (I don't synch it. I already had my maintenance calories with/without exercise pretty well dialed in before I got it, so I just keep rolling with those numbers, and maintain fine when I stick with them.)

LiveOnceBeHappy

AnnPT77 wrote: »

LiveOnceBeHappy wrote: »

panda4153 wrote: »

I have found it to be super accurate, for years now I have kept a spreadsheet with my calorie intake and my total calories burned each day that I get from my watch, and my weightI gain or lose within a tenth of of a pound each month as compared to what the math from my spreadsheet says it should be. This has been true month over month for 4 years now

Can I ask a question? So, my watch says I burned 421 calories (out of the 400 I set for a goal) in the Move (red) category. I have 61/30 minutes of Exercise (green) also. So, why is MFP pulling in 206 calories for exercise? Is that from the 61/30 minutes of Exercise and ignores the Move?

I feel like I need a decoder ring to understand this!

Oversimplifying, the adjustment is the reconciliation between the number of calories MFP expects you to burn (based on what you put in your profile) versus the number of calories the tracker estimates you burn all day from all activities, exercise and otherwise.

Let's say MFP estimates your BMR at 1500 (just for simplicity, not real), and your activity level makes it use a multiplier of 1.5 to estimate your calorie needs before exercise, so it thinks your pre-exercise maintenance calories are 2250. Then the tracker sees you do stuff all day (exercise, steps, anything else it can estimate), and estimates you burned 2500 calories, based on the profile settings it has, and let's pretend 400 of that was exercise calories.

By end of day, I'd expect an adjustment of 250, the difference between MFP's expectation, and the tracker's estimate. If you're set for a calorie deficit, the 250 gets added to your deficit calorie goal, to keep your same weight loss rate. If you're set for maintenance, it gets added to your maintenance calories (in your MFP goal).

If there are adjustments periodically during the day, some of those could be misleading, because there's potentially algorithmic guessing in there about how you'll spend the balance of the day.

As far as whether to trust a tracker, maybe think of it this way: The tracker is estimating. It can't measure calories. It measures things that correlate more or less well with calorie burn, then estimates calories, using its measurements plus the data you put in your profile on the tracker.

The assumptions and data used to make these estimates generally come from research studies on large groups of people. Essentially, oversimplifying a little, the tracker is spitting out a statistical estimate that amounts to the average calorie expenditure for people who are like you in the limited data values the tracker knows about you (age, weight, etc.), and who do the activities it thinks you did.

Therefore, one way to look at this is not "is the tracker accurate?" but more like "how average am I?" The specific "non-averageness" may not be obvious.

My tracker (not Apple, doesn't matter what) is very inaccurate for me on all-day calorie estimates, like 25-30% off. The same brand/model - per reports from others here - is pretty darned close for a lot of other people. My conclusion is not that the tracker is bad/inaccurate, but more that I'm somehow not very average. (I don't synch it. I already had my maintenance calories with/without exercise pretty well dialed in before I got it, so I just keep rolling with those numbers, and maintain fine when I stick with them.)

Thank you for a detailed and thorough response. I appreciate your time. I guess I just need time, as others suggested, to figure out what works for me and my life. Am I average? That is the question! Funny, I'm a math teacher, but these algorithms are throwing me. :-)