Calorie Deductions with Apple Watch Tracking

boominkouman

HI! this is my first day here and I'm a tad confused on the app sharing/tracking. I connected my Apple Health App info and it seems to only deduct my calories from my workout on the MyFitnessApp. Should it deduct all of the calories that I have burned on my red activity ring through apple or just from a logged exercise? I burned 124cal in my workout but my activity ring for the day says 500 Active calories burned. Just asking bc I don't want to under eat (or over eat for that matter). Thanks!

AnnPT77

Overall, the adjustment in your calorie goal should be based on the number of calories MFP expected you to burn, versus the number of calories your tracker saw you as burning . . . total calories, not just exercise calories.

MFP sets your base calorie goal by using your age, height, weight and activity level setting to estimate how many calories you burn on an average day, then subtracts some number of calories from that based on your requested weight loss rate. That result is your basic calorie goal in MFP.

You're intended to set your activity level based on your life EXCLUDING intentional exercise. Then, in principle, when you do some exercise you get extra calories to eat.

When you sync a tracker, conceptually MFP and the tracker compare what MFP thought you'd burn in an average day with what your tracker saw you as burning that actual day. If your tracker says you burned more calories than MFP expected, MFP will add calories to your goal for that day. If your tracker says you burned fewer calories than MFP expected, and you have negative adjustments turned on in MFP, MFP will subtract calories from your calorie goal that day. The intent is to keep the same calorie deficit on each day, so you lose weight at close to the requested rate.

I'm not clear whether you're asking about a subtraction from your calorie goal as described above, or a negative adjustment in the details MFP shows you about how it got to that result for your calorie goal.

Other than possible bugs in the software, the most common reason to get a negative adjustment in your calorie goal for the day is that your activity level setting is higher than your actual activity turned out to be.

Many people who sync a tracker set their MFP activity level at sedentary/not very active - the lowest level - so that they get mostly positive adjustments.

But all of the above is talking about your overall calorie goal for the day. If you're looking at the details of exercise calculations leading to your net total calorie adjustment, then sometimes there will be plus and minus adjustments to get to that net result. For example, if your tracker saw lots of steps for the day, but some of the steps happened while you were on a treadmill or jogging outdoors in an exercise session, you might see some subtractions in the exercise calorie details so that you wouldn't get double calorie credit for the steps - they would count as either daily life steps or exercise steps, but not double-count as both. I hope that makes sense.

Typically, the final calorie adjustment to your MFP daily calorie goal won't be your MFP base calories plus your active calories, or your MFP base calories plus all your activity calories. MFP already expected you to have some activity in your day, based on your activity level setting in your profile. The calorie adjustment to your MFP daily calorie goal should be the difference between MFP's estimate and your tracker's estimate of your day's total calorie burn, essentially. That difference could be positive (tracker says you burned more calories than MFP expected) or negative (tracker says you burned fewer calories than MFP expected).