MFP exercise calories

Kelly, for simple exercises like "Walking, 4mph" MyFitnessPal tends to be dead-on. As you say, it knows your age, gender, height, weight, etc. Thus, its numbers (at least for me) tend to agree really well with both exercise machines and heart rate monitors.

For complex exercises like "Elliptical" or "Hiking" there are no easy fixes. For the elliptical it doesn't know your minute-by-minute speed, resistance, and incline. For hiking, it doesn't know your speed, elevation gain, or pack weight. The good news is, this is where an exercise machine or more targeted calculator can typically provide the information you need.

I eat 100% of my calories back and it's working well for me, but I defer to more accurate measuring devices whenever they're available and replace MFP's estimates with those.

It's just a calculator and works on best guesstimate, like everything else. Treadmills and ellipticals... even the daily target given by MFP is not going to be accurate for everyone. Two people with the exact same height, weight, sex, and age are still going to have varying results. Best thing to do is try it out for a month or two (MFP target plus 1/2 exercise cals), and adjust according to your results. If you are losing at an appropriate rate, you are doing fine, if too fast, increase your intake, if too slow, reduce your intake. Make sure you are realistic with your expectations. Remember that calorie intake will need to adjust downward as your weight decreases.

There is waaaay too much variance between individuals and how they approach working out, as well as all the activities and intensities that could be included under a certain umbrella term, plus it isn't exactly easy to formally study the average calorie burn of a certain exercise (for simpler, more consistent and hugely practiced things like walking you have a decent chance at finding numbers based on actual experimentation but beyond that it's just a guess). The only way anything could know for sure is if it has way too much access to your bodily functions, and/or somebody has spent thousands on grant money to see what the net calorie loss for burpees is and then the forumla taken from this study asks you to input way too much info on yourself and the activity. All we have are guesses, and if a site trying to get you to feel good about working out and burning calories has to be biased one way or the other, it's going to tell you that you just got a gold star for that cardio session.

I totally agree! It's infuriating, because I find that MFP makes a massive difference to my determination, and I trust it and rely on it. It's really frustrating to be told all the time that all my exercise logging is lies!

kellysdavies wrote: »

I just don't know why MFP doesn't just half the calories it gives and then the advice is to everyone to make sure they eat all the calories back they're given for the exercise. Seems a healthier more positive approach.
I'm fine with it, I use FITBIT anyway and use other apps and calculators... but I just think it's daft that's it an accepted process and advice given on literally every post I've seen to only eat back half. Seems counter-productive to me.

Fitbit will not be completely accurate either. It is also a calculator. I found significant differences between Fitbit, BodyMedia, and MFP. If the numbers bother you, you have the ability to manually change them when they are entered so that you will only see the half count.

Are you manually adding in exercises here, plus allowing Fitbit to adjust your calories? That would be creating a double count on exercise, which won't help. Hopefully, you aren't, but I thought it was worth mentioning.