Calorie adjustment in app

JenniferSmith35

Can someone please explain to me what the calorie adjustment under exercise/steps means? Yesterday I had 9100 steps in that number is zero. Why is there no ‘calories burned’ for the steps?

AnnPT77

Here's a theory - well, partly a theory, partly facts.

Facts: When we sync a fitness tracker or step counter to MFP, it's not just going to blindly assign extra calories. Behind the scenes, it's trying to reconcile the "activity level" setting you put in your MFP profile with what the tracker/step counter saw as happening in real life.

If someone sets their activity level higher than what the activity tracker/step counter sees happening, or equal to it, no calories will be added. (If they have the MFP "negative adjustment" setting turned on, they may even see calories subtracted.) If they get added calories, it will be the positive difference between what MFP estimated their calorie expenditure would be, and what the tracker actually saw as happening.

Even MFP's sedentary/not very active setting assumes we have a daily life where we burn some calories on top of our basal metabolic rate (BMR, calories burned just from being alive). Until we accumulate more calorie burn than that (as seen by the tracker), we're not getting extra calories in MFP. For most people, that sedentary/not very active level would maybe be somewhere in the realm of 3500-5000 or so steps, or equivalent other movement. Higher settings would assume more steps/movement.

Of course, there could also be a bug or a sync problem. But extra calories from activity won't happen until we burn more calories than MFP's basic estimate expected.

springlering62

When you set your goals, you also chose an “activity level”. That level assumes a presumed calorie burn in advance, since it interprets your activity level as higher than the average Joe. As a result, though, you get a higher starting daily calorie allotment.

If you don’t reach that level of activity, you won’t be awarded extra calories for steps.

Conversely, if you have “negative calorie adjustment” activated for your tracker, MFP will often adjust your calories down.

This is my exercise log for yesterday, including a large deduction. Crazy, right?



But if you think about it, many of my steps yesterday were actually part of my workouts. The app knows I can’t get credit for both workouts and steps at the same time, so it goes in and adjusts my total with a negative number.

It can be maddening to see, can feel like punishment, but once you think about it, it makes perfect sense.

One day last week, I did 19,000 steps (and no other workouts),mostly inside my home, while I moved and consolidated a large collection to the garage, rearranged library shelves, cleaned out a couple of closets. I only walked the dog about a mile and a half, which is very unusual. I got little to no credit at all for any of those steps, and in fact even got a small negative calorie adjustment, again because I set myself as “highly active”.

Unfortunately, choosing your activity level is “best guess”, because MFP doesn’t provide a scale or dropdown to assist you in choosing.