App changed my exercise calories?

TaylaWaterworth3040

I've been using the app for a week, and basing my diet on the net calories it gives. Today I opened it to log breakfast and found that it had adjusted my calories burnt by exercise quite significantly - almost halving them. Now I'm listed as over my calorie goal every day this week, when it previously said I was under. What gives?? I checked and it's still accurately tracking the exercise I did; it just says I burnt fewer calories than it previously claimed.

spiriteagle99

Is your watch/fitness tracker synced to the website? It could be that your activity level says that you intend to be more active than your watch says that you actually are, so it is subtracting active calories. i.e. if you are expected to do 10000 steps a day but only do 3000, the program would deduct the difference.

PAV8888

Do you go to bed or stop being active a few hours before midnight?

Most fitness trackers start from your Mifflin St Jeor BMR and spread it over the 1440 minutes of the day. Then they add "extra" based on the activity MET level they infer from the way your tracker moves and your heart rate changes. This means that your total calories to THIS minute reach a peak when you stop moving around. And then coast along at 1.0 or even 0.9x BMR if you're deeply asleep and depending on trackers all the way to the end of day at midnight.

MFP assigns a pre-set activity level to every minute of your day based on the activity level you select. And I finally have found official confirmation for the levels I had previously inferred: they now are 1.4x BMR for sedentary / not very active, 1.6x for low / lightly active, 1.8 for active and 2.0 for very active.

Most people who connect trackers seem to chose sedentary as their base. They would be looking at losing about 0.4x BMR calories per minute from their "peak" number as they lounge around till midnight.

when I was using MFP I was setup as very active. The change to 2.0 would have made my life easier because instead of estimating 0.8x BMR calories x minutes to midnight I would have been able to just do 1.0 :-)

Of course you don't have to DO anything. The system will automatically adjust the calories at midnight and you will wake up in the morning with less exercise calories than you thought you had.

The only reason -I- was trying to figure out the numbers was that, of course, I was after maximizing every delicious calorie I was allotted while still achieving my deficit numbers. And since the adjustments could easily come to 300+ Calories in my case, I had to be careful to allow for enough slack while still consuming my late night meal—but without missing out on any calories that would legitimately remain there to be eaten! :)

Reference to post explaining the new numbers: https://www.reddit.com/r/Myfitnesspal/comments/1gyps6v/myfitnesspal_changed_daily_calorie_goal/

csplatt

At times I’ll have an accidental double dip recorded (as step movement AND as exercise), then the step one will disappear because it was double counting my movement.