Why don’t the calories burned showing in my watch, also show up in MFP?

jebenne

Hey everyone, so I’m on this amazing health journey like so many others! I have been wearing my Garmin Vivo Sport watch for months and it seems fairly accurate. I connected it to MFP about two weeks ago. I see the calories that I burn being counted properly on my watch, yet it will show like 4 calories burned in MFP?! Annoying to say the least. I have disconnected and reconnected, no luck. I have scoured the internet for answers, nothing great there either. I also don’t get why weight lifting shows up as nothing in MFP? If I walk, even just shopping or something suddenly I am burning all these calories. Not sweating, barely raised my heart rate even! Yet lifting weights and struggling for near an hour shows as nothing?! Trust me I’m sweating, pushing to failure, my heart rate is more than double its resting bpm as well. I just want all this to make sense and I’m so lost! Help!

AnnPT77

Are you talking about the exercise calories or the calorie adjustment being 4 calories?

If it's the calorie adjustment, that wouldn't match the exercise calories on the Garmin side. Once you're looking at a full day, the adjustment is difference between what MFP thought you would burn based on the settings in your MFP profile, vs. what the tracker actually estimated you burned that day. Depending on your MFP settings - especially your activity level setting - that could theoretically be almost any value . . . including negative values if you have negative adjustments turned on in MFP (which I'd recommend doing).

There is a page in MFP where you can see a more detailed breakdown of how the sync worked, but I'm sorry, I can't recall where it is . . . I don't have my Garmin synced to MFP at this point (long story, but not involving reasons that would apply for everyone else - syncing is generally good).

Probably the reason you don't get many calories for strength training, maybe none in a sync to MFP, is that strength training doesn't burn very many calories. Yes, it's hard, and heart rate may go up, but not for reasons that have much to do with calorie burn. Heart rate increases more from strain than calorie burn during strength training. Heart rate doesn't directly correlate with calorie burn, oxygen consumption does. Heart rate is just a proxy. Heart rate is really only a good estimator of calorie burn during steady state moderate cardio, and even then there are some caveats. IMU, some of the better trackers now don't use heart rate to estimate strength training calories because of that. I'm inclined to think Garmin is one of them, since Garmin only gives me like 150 calories per hour for strength training. That's not massively more than I'd burn doing regular daily life activities, so it wouldn't surprise me to get much of an MFP calorie adjustment from it.

Also, if you're comparing the exercise calories from Garmin to the calorie adjustment, that's inaccurate in another way, depending on details. You may've noticed that Garmin - at least for some of devices/activities - gives separate numbers for the exercise session for resting calories vs. exercise calories. Only a portion of that exercise calories number could affect the MFP calorie adjustment . . . the amount in excess of your BMR+activity level calories for the time period on the MFP side. Even then, if you rest more or are less active at other times of day - less active according to the tracker than your BMR+activity level calories MFP has estimated, that less-active period will net out with the more-active periods so the adjustment would potentially be less than the exercise session's exercise calories. The exercise session's resting calories are already accounted for in your MFP BMR estimate, pretty much.

It's not as simple as expecting exercise calories just to transfer over to MFP and get added to your goal, if that was what you were thinking.