What decides the amount of calories earned from exercise?

akkaborg

Hey, I was wondering how the amount of 'extra calories earned from exercise' is decided. Is it a certain percentage or everything? Does it vary from activity to activity? And is everything calculated when you complete the diary?

Lietchi

It depends on the type of activity (running burns more than walking for example) and your personal stats (a heavier body burns more calories).

I'm not sure what you mean by 'is everything calculated when you complete the diary'.
Completing the diary just gives you an unreliable 5 week prediction, but doesn't do anything else. Completing your diary is entirely optional.

AnnPT77

The exercise activity you put in your MFP profile as a goal (minutes and times/week) doesn't affect your calorie goal at all. It's just used for some motivational messaging and weekly totals against goal, and not much even for that.

There are two ways exercise can affect your calorie goal:

1. You explicitly log exercise activities in the MFP cardiovascular exercise section. There, the calculation uses a researched based metric called "METS" to yield a calorie estimate that will vary with your body weight (as recorded in MFP at the time) and the number of minutes of exercise you enter.

2. You sync a fitness tracker (Fitbit, Garmin, whatever) to MFP. In that case, the tracker and MFP compare data during the day to put activity calorie adjustments into your log. By the end of the day, what will have happened is (loosely) that MFP believes that you spent the calories your tracker estimated, and MFP adjusts your eating goal to keep your estimated weight loss rate what you asked for in your profile set-up. The data exchange between the two will add calories if they're synced, but you also have to enable negative adjustments if you want MFP to subtract calories when your calorie burn (as seen by your tracker) is less than what MFP initially estimated (based on your activity level setting and demographic data). The adjustment from a tracker is an adjustment for all types of activity the tracker sees, daily life stuff as well as intentional exercise.

Before end of day, for most trackers, MFP and the tracker will generate some tentative adjustments based on the theory that you'll be about as active later in the day as you've been already so far. By end of day, it should be a full reconciliation.

Other than that, nothing is adding exercise calories.