How Accurate Are MyFitnessPal Calorie Estimates?

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audneybennett
audneybennett Posts: 2 Member
in Food and Nutrition

Do you find MyFitnessPal’s calorie counts to be accurate? Any tips for making sure you’re logging correctly?

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  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 10,630 Member

    Most of the database is user-sourced. You are free to add 100g of chocolate for 2kcal and 40g protein, and other people are free to use exactly this. Thus double check the nutritional info of the food items you select. Once you've used them a few times they'll first appear when you search. Also, avoid using complete meals because you have no idea what ingredients the creator of that entry used. Make your own, weighing and logging every ingredient separately. In a few days this will be very quick.

  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 37,123 Member

    Estimates of food calories or estimates of individual's calorie needs?

    Yirara said relevant things about the foods. If you were asking about the calorie needs estimates:

    MFP bases their estimates on reasonable scientific research. The estimate a person gets is pretty much just the average calorie needs for demographically similar people.

    Here's the rub: We're not all average. Sure, most people are close to average, by definition. That's statistically extra true when based on data with a relatively small standard deviation. These estimates are based on BMR estimates, which do tend to have a relatively small standard deviation, i.e., the bell curve is tall and narrow.

    However, we're each individuals. A few people can still be noticeably far off the average, either high or low. A rare few may be surprisingly far off . . . out in the tails of the bell curve, loosely speaking.

    Many people report here that they've found MFP's calorie needs estimates reasonably close for them. A few people report otherwise. Some of those latter, I fear, believe the estimates aren't accurate for them for reasons other than the estimates' actual accuracy - things like over-estimating exercise calories, not logging foods very meticulously or consistently, etc. But some are genuinely just not average, for reasons that may not be obvious.

    Maybe I'm deluded, and should attribute it to logging issues myself, but MFP is about 25-30% off in estimating my calorie needs as compared with nearly 10 years of quite careful food logging and weight-change data. Two different Garmin models have estimated similar to MFP, so are equally far off from my reality. The difference amounts to hundreds of calories daily. I think it's reasonable to infer that's because I'm somehow statistically unusual.

    In theory, a thing like that can happen, whether a person believes me or not. I think it does happen. YMMV.

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