Tracking cals on Apple Watch

willdanielsip

Good morning team, hope all is well?

I'm at a relatively early stage in my fitness journey, and have been using both my Apple Watch and MyFitnessPal. I wanted to ask why there is such a discrepancy between active cals and MyFitnessPal cals?

For context, I do an 8km walk at the end of my day. I enter that I have completed 84 mins of walking on MyFitnessPal app and it suggests I've burned 170 calories. However my watch suggests I've burned 744 active calories. Which should I believe? Any help would be much appreciated.

springlering62

Hi, @willdanielsip welcome to the boards!

Is your watch new? Mine seems to have “learned” me the longer I had it. Accuracy increased dramatically.

Are you overweight? When I first got mine, I was obese. It takes a lot more calories to move (in my case) the extra hundred pounds. I was getting much higher calorie burns, but they dropped-pretty dramatically- along the way. An 8km (appx 5 miles) used to get me about 500 calories, now that I’m at goal, it gets me around 350, doing 3mph.

Do you have your correct height, gender and current weight entered in your Apple Watch (and MFP- seems so obvious, but asking because so many people don’t bother and then get bent out of shape because they perceive their calorie goals as inaccurate. Well….duh.)

And also a bit confused. If Apple Watch is syncing with MFP, MFP should automatically record what Apple Watch is reporting. So where is the 177 on MFP coming from?

This is my exercise log from yesterday. I didn’t have to hand-enter any of the exercises except weight training. I only enter it as 1 calorie so I’ll know which days I did it. The others, all I had to do was start and stop an exercise on my watch and it reported to MFP seamlessly.




You’ll see a negative Apple Watch adjustment on mine. Don’t worry about that until you become active enough to start exceeding 4-500 exercise calories burnt per day. Its mainly an adjustment for people who are highly active. Can explain, but get the basics down first.

Stick with it. Apple Watch + MFP = World Rocked. It was when I out the two together that my dim brain finally made the connection between all the junk I was eating versus how long it took to burn off a single serving of same. That was when the lightbulb clicked on and I started firing on all cylinders.

Much success to you!



Oh and finally, you can always do a reset of your Apple Watch, under the Apple Watch app, but I wouldn’t do it if you’ve been exercising for a short time. It has to have its own lightbulb moment and say “oh, this is how Will rolls”.

springlering62

One more thing- your watch will actually show two different calorie burns.

One includes calories you’d have burned sitting on the sofa + calories burned via the additional exercise, over and above. Your “move” ring turns based on this number.

The second is the net burn for the exercise you’ve done. It’s the brighter number (at least in my set-up).

One thing that really helped me lose weight at a good pace was to set a goal to turn my move ring X number of times per day.

Now that I’m in maintenance, calories required to turn my ring are much lower, but I’ve left it set at 300, because it’s an easy number to track, and to set daily goals. I know most training and classes get me a turn of the ring. An hour swimming laps will easily get me 2 or so turns, so I can quickly calculate how to reach my goal when I get up in the morning.

Also, doing Apple Watch challenges helped at first- although I did have to quit because I became obsessive over it, and raged over my “lazy” anonymous teammates not pulling their load. Then I realized how ridiculous I was being, and that it wasn’t good for me. Apple doesn’t build rest days into those challenges. I quit cold turkey because it was messing with my head.

But Challenges got me on the road to better health and I am grateful for that.

willdanielsip

springlering62 wrote: »

One more thing- your watch will actually show two different calorie burns.

One includes calories you’d have burned sitting on the sofa + calories burned via the additional exercise, over and above. Your “move” ring turns based on this number.

The second is the net burn for the exercise you’ve done. It’s the brighter number (at least in my set-up).

One thing that really helped me lose weight at a good pace was to set a goal to turn my move ring X number of times per day.

Now that I’m in maintenance, calories required to turn my ring are much lower, but I’ve left it set at 300, because it’s an easy number to track, and to set daily goals. I know most training and classes get me a turn of the ring. An hour swimming laps will easily get me 2 or so turns, so I can quickly calculate how to reach my goal when I get up in the morning.

Also, doing Apple Watch challenges helped at first- although I did have to quit because I became obsessive over it, and raged over my “lazy” anonymous teammates not pulling their load. Then I realized how ridiculous I was being, and that it wasn’t good for me. Apple doesn’t build rest days into those challenges. I quit cold turkey because it was messing with my head.

But Challenges got me on the road to better health and I am grateful for that.

Thanks so much for taking so much time to write this. I am a little larger at 107kg at the moment. I think there was an issue with the syncing between my watch and the app, but all sorted now! Enjoying the process so far. All the best for your journey!

MargaretYakoda

100% everything @springlering62 said

I log whatever the active calories on my Apple Watch show, and ignore any number MFP suggests for calories burned.

I’ve had my Apple Watch for many years. It knows my habits best.

I also have all my goals set to rock bottom minimum because sometimes it’s difficult for me personally to manage more.
But closing that exercise ring and the stand rings really helps.
My exercise ring is set for 5 minutes, but hey. Once I’m exercising I might as well go longer than that 5.