Sudden calorie changes?

RainyDaysAgain

My calorie goal (set by MFP) has been 1380 for months. Yesterday it randomly dropped to 1250. I went into my settings today to see if anything had changed. Now my calorie goal is over 1500! Does anybody know why this would have happened?

totameafox

do you have a fitness tracker hooked up to mfp or have you reset your goals?

RainyDaysAgain

It adds in calories when I take walks, if that is what you mean. But I don’t think that caused the change. It adds exercise calories, and always has. But it changed the base calorie goal from 1380 to 1250. And then I went to double check that my goal was still 2 pound weight loss, it upped to my calories to 1580

totameafox

I don't know when mfp changed they way they calculate base calories. I think they used to be tdee but now base calories on activity not including exercise. So you might want to reset your goals without exercise and see what it comes up with. Or you could include your stats and someone can crunch numbers to see if what they are giving you is inline with what we would expect.

PAV8888

@totameafox MFP, to date, has yet to include deliberate exercise in the base activity level

What happened recently (late 2024? Early 2025?) is that they changed the activity factor for each definition.

Caloric expenditure estimates basically take your BMR/RMR number (most, including MFP, use the Mifflin St Jeor equation to come up with that) and then multiply that number by an activity factor/activity multiplier.

For each word based definition, MFP increased that number.

Which means that the implied maintenance calories for each definition went up.

Whether that's accurate for a particular individual will be seen by comparing their long term expected results to their actual

totameafox

thanks for clarifying. I am limited in my ability to exercise so I have never included it as a factor for anything. And my memory is crap so remembering why they changed their formula was a bit difficult.