Calories Setting

mariabailey100

Does the app automatically set your calories based on your weight and height?

AnnPT77

It will give you a starting estimate if you put your demographic data in your profile as per instructions, then run guided setup.

That - or the estimate from any other calorie calculator or even fitness tracker - is just an estimate. Follow that starting estimate for 4-6 weeks pretty closely (like +/- around 50 calories on average daily). If you're female and have menstrual cycles, go for at least one full cycle so you're comparing body weight at the same relative point in at least 2 different cycles.

Once you have that much personal data, you can compare your average weekly weight change over the whole time period to your targeted weekly weight change and adjust your calorie goal based on the personal experience data. Personal experience data (over those multi-weeks, carefully recorded) is a much better estimate than any calculator or fitness tracker will give you, even if your results confirm the calculator/tracker estimate.

Even then, if the first week or two look wildly different from what follows, I'd throw out that week or two from the data, and go another week or two to get something more reasonable. (Bodies are weird. They can respond oddly to big changes in eating and exercise at first. That weirdness tends to settle out after a while. Two weeks is probably a realistic limit for most people who have initial weirdness.)

Why do all this? Because what the calculators spit out is basically the statistical average for people who have those same basic demographic characteristics you have. Most people are close to average, a few will be noticeably off (higher or lower), and a rare few will be surprisingly far off (still potentially in either direction). That's simply the nature of statistical estimates.

Fitness trackers use more types of data in their estimates, so they may be a bit more nuanced, but they're still spitting out the calories that an average person would burn while producing the data values they actually do measure (none of which are calories directly).

The issue is that you are not a population average. You're a unique individual. You don't know whether you're close to average, high or low, or even very high or very low until you collect enough personal data to average out yourself. The reasons for being non-average may not be obvious, either . . . but the experience data tells a useful story about what calorie needs actually are in context of your individual situation.

Myself, I'm one of the unusual weirdos. My calorie needs, based on 9+ years of logging experience during loss then maintenance, differ from MFP's estimate by around 25-30%. They also differ by a similar percent from my good brand/model fitness tracker's estimate, and that's a brand/model (actually 2 different models so far) that others here have said is reasonably close for them. Why? I could speculate, but I don't actually know. Don't much care.

The estimates aren't "wrong". It's that I'm not average. Once I figured that out as described above, I was able to estimate my average weekly weight changes reasonably closely, based on my personal experience. That's useful.

Best wishes!