Negative Adjustments

A negative adjustment will subtract calories from your daily allotment when your activity (as measured by a synced device) is less than what is assumed by your activity level (what you choose when you set your goals).

If I tell MFP I am active it will give me a higher level of calories than if I choose sedentary. But if I spend Saturday on the couch watching Netflix, I don't want to eat an active level of calories that day. Negative adjustments will remove calories based on my lower activity that day.

deveroux766 wrote: »

janejellyroll wrote: »

A negative adjustment will subtract calories from your daily allotment when your activity (as measured by a synced device) is less than what is assumed by your activity level (what you choose when you set your goals).

If I tell MFP I am active it will give me a higher level of calories than if I choose sedentary. But if I spend Saturday on the couch watching Netflix, I don't want to eat an active level of calories that day. Negative adjustments will remove calories based on my lower activity that day.

So should I enable negative adjustment in my MFP profile? I am definitely more active during the week!

I personally think if you are going to eat the calories generated when you move more (which I assume you are if you're asking the question), you should eat less when you eat less.

What you should expect to see: when you wake up, you will probably have fewer calories than your default. This is because you've been lying in bed. But as you move more, you will break even and then you will start to see your activity adjustments (assuming you move enough that day). The negative part is taken care of by the negative adjustments. Everything else is just the normal syncing. I would say on an average day, I've had 50-80 calories deducted when I wake up and I'm back to my regular default by the time I've taken the dogs out and had breakfast.

I think negative adjustment isn't personally helpful.

Set MFP to sedentary and then let fitbit do the positive calorie adjustment for you. No need to eat under your "sedentary" calories.

HorrorGeekLiz wrote: »

I have a FitBit and I have negative adjustments enabled. I have my activity level set at sedentary because I have a desk job. What I have found, through the FitBit, is the negative adjustment usually only lasts through through about 2k steps as a daily total. So, in other words, you'd have to stay in bed all day to actually lose calories by the end of the day. The MFP settings for sedentary are just about dead on for a lazy day. So, any kind of extra walking or activity I do earns me calories.

I have had it on since last July and have only kept a negative adjustment for a day once. And it proves your point because I was sick and only got out of bed twice that day. I wasn't just in bed, I was actually sleeping for the majority of the day.

NorthCascades wrote: »

erinc5 wrote: »

I think negative adjustment isn't personally helpful.

I'm starting to feel the same way.

I set my profile here up as sedentary and turned negative adjustments on, to be as conservative as possible. I'm confident in how I measure my exercise calories, and they vary from day to day. So having my basal metabolic rate plus my actuals makes sense.

But MFP seems to project out your whole day at once, and Garmin reports until "now." So in the morning there is a large adjustment that shrinks as the day goes by. Which isn't helpful.

Most athletes will never move so little in a whole day as to legitimately trigger this, except maybe on a rest day after a very hard workout. Yesterday was supposed to be a rest day for me and I still went for a run.

Yeah. And, I don't know about other people's experiences, but with the negative adjustments enabled, the adjustment would only take away about 60 calories if I were in bed literally the entire day. That is such an insignificant amount, unless perhaps you are the type of person to get less than 2,000 steps per day on a consistent basis, like 5 days a week or something. It only makes sense if you have your setting to anything other than "sedentary" and I don't know why you'd want to do that if you have a fitbit. It measures your activity level for you. That's the entire point.

Also, you can change your setting on FitBit to be "projected" or "real time". I actually can't decide which I like better.