My fitness pal and strava exercise calories not accurate

anonymousANONYMOUS8868

Why is the strava calories not reporting accurately on my fitness pal?

If I burn 1000cal cycling it says maybe 600.

Ot on peloton burm 380 and it says 260 on MFP.

AnnPT77

Admission: I don't use Strava or Peloton, and every device/app syncs to MFP with potentially some different details. I hope someone will come along and answer who knows those specifics for your case.

Generically, exercise calories on a device aren't likely to come across to MFP with exactly the same numbers and add that many calories to goal calories. Why?

On my device, much of the time the exercise calories are the total number of calories burned during the exercise time slot. But MFP already assumed I was burning some calories during that time slot.

Some of MFP's assumed calories were my "just being alive" calories, a.k.a. basal metabolic rate (BMR) or resting metabolic rate (RMR). I wouldn't want those calories to be added to my MFP calorie goal because they're already in my calorie goal. Adding them would be double counting. So the number that's added in MFP should be discounted based on the estimated BMR/RMR calories for that time slot.

Sometimes, my device tells me resting calories and separately active calories for an exercise session. The resting calories are the BMR/RMR estimate, the ones I already said we don't want to double count. But guess what? MFP already assumed I'd be doing something in that time slot besides just being alive, more or less the average of my MFP "activity level" calories spent on things like home chores, job, etc. MFP doesn't know what I'm doing every second of the day, so it sort of averages over the day. I also don't want to double-count those calories, either, because they're already in my calorie goal in MFP.

Ideally, what I want to add to my calorie goal is just the exercise calories that MFP wouldn't know about, which is a portion of the active calories, specifically the calories in excess of what MFP thought I'd burn being alive and doing normal life stuff during that time period.

By the end of the day, conceptually what should be happening is MFP and the synced device/app comparing the total calories MFP thought I'd burn with the total calories the device/app saw me as burning. If I told MFP I wanted to lose weight, it already included a calorie deficit in my calorie goal to accomplish that loss. So what the sync tries to do is add to my goal any estimated calories the device saw that are in excess of the estimated calories MFP thought I'd burn to maintain my current weight, to keep my calorie deficit for the weight loss rate I requested.

If and only if the negative calorie adjustment is turned on in MFP, MFP will also subtract calories from my eating goal on a particular day, if the device/app estimates I burned fewer calories all day than MFP expected.

Exactly how that all looks in the device/app and in MFP varies between different brands/models of synced apps or devices. But that's what the sync is trying to do. Probably not all of the sync processes are as well-designed as one might prefer, since it involves both MFP and the device manufacturer collaborating and communicating in a nuanced way, but that's what the intent is.

Keep in mind, too, it's all estimates on both sides, including any good brand/model of tracker. None of these things are truly measuring calorie burn. They're measuring other things - movement, heart rate, altitude changes, map coordinates via GPS, etc. - that kind of tend to correlate with calorie burn. They use statistics that are the average for similar people to estimate the calories. Good ones will be close for most people, but a few people are farther from average.

A 4-6 week trial - whole menstrual cycle for people who have them - will shed light on how close the estimates are for an individual. If average weekly weight change is reasonably close to requested change, a person is average, more or less. If not reasonably close, then it's time to manually adjust calorie goal.

I'm one of the non-average weirdos. Both MFP and my good brand/model tracker - one that estimates well for others - are off by hundreds of calories daily, compared to my personal results from careful food, activity, and body weight logging for going on ten years now. It's rare, but it can happen.

I decided to reply generically, seeing that you weren't getting any help from people with the same configuration of apps. I hope the above makes sense.