Negative calorie adjustments

Emzy1079
Emzy1079 Posts: 27 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
Hey all!!
I have a Garmin vivoactive hr and wondering how people have there negative calorie adjustment set. Enabled or disabled. I set them as enabled and don't seem to earn the exercise calories on MFP. Always in a negative
Any input on this setting would be much appreciated.
Thanks

Replies

  • shadow2soul
    shadow2soul Posts: 7,692 Member
    The setting is so that when you don't burn what MFP estimated for your stats and selected activity level (higher activity level = higher calorie burn before seeing an adjustment) that you will lose calories to maintain whatever deficit you wanted (bottoming out at 1200).

    So say at the end of the day Garmin thinks you burned 1800 and MFP thought you would burn 2000. You want a 500 calorie deficit, well if MFP didn't subtract 200 calories from your goal your deficit would only be 300 instead.
  • Rusty740
    Rusty740 Posts: 749 Member
    I'd be careful with this setting. I have a Vivosmart HR (VSHR) that shows calories burned up to that time during the day and it includes heart rate in the calculation. The problem is that it is chronically low, I think due to the software reducing the sampling of heart rate, based on a software update. I have taken pains to properly estimate my BMR and sedentary and active calorie needs (search online for this stuff) and then set MFP so I will lose about 0.5 lbs per week. MFP will treat the VSHR as a more important value than the MFP calorie value you set, and the way this works is if your vivoactive HR is telling you that you've only burned 1500 calories today, but you've set MFP to 1750, then MFP will use the (negative calorie adjustment) and only show you should eat 1500. It is always negative. If you want a positive adjustment you need to do alot of work :) or more easily, when you go for a walk, track the activity on you vivoactive HR. That way it will show up as an activity and activities have an easier time transferring to MFP for calories.

    The problem is whether or not your vivoactive HR is very accurate or not. I'd go ahead and enable it for a week and see if it makes sense to you, but keep in mind it will always be negative. I think it's designed to tell you when you've had a slow day ;)
  • Shannyzo1
    Shannyzo1 Posts: 10 Member
    I was wondering myself about this. I have a Fitbit and it adds an extreme amount of Neg calories back, today I walked almost 21,000 steps it put almost 850 cal, with my workout it bumped up to 1200 cal. How accurate is this?
    I guess the most important thing is to keep moving
  • singletrackmtbr
    singletrackmtbr Posts: 644 Member
    edited June 2016
    About a month ago Garmin updated their software, creating a different formula for RHR and reducing calories burned by about 15 percent. Despite tons of threads from users begging garmin to fix it nothing has been done.

    Now on most days I get a negative adjustment until I hit about 10000 steps. I am set at the lowest activity level on MFP but it doesn't matter. IMO it's completely inaccurate. Most days now I end up in the red because of it, yet somehow I'm still losing weight.

    I keep holding out hope that a fix will come. Once I hit maintenance I'll probably disable negative adjustments.
  • shadow2soul
    shadow2soul Posts: 7,692 Member
    Shannyzo1 wrote: »
    I was wondering myself about this. I have a Fitbit and it adds an extreme amount of Neg calories back, today I walked almost 21,000 steps it put almost 850 cal, with my workout it bumped up to 1200 cal. How accurate is this?
    I guess the most important thing is to keep moving
    @Shannyzo1 -
    Negative adjustments = MFP taking calories away from your calorie goal (you don't get to eat as much)
    You are getting a positive adjustment of 850 which is being subtracted from your intake to determine your NET calories.
    Basically MFP thinks that by midnight your calorie burn will be 850 higher then what it estimated originally based on your activity level setting.
    If you have your activity level set to anything other then Sedentary, your adjustment will probably decrease by a couple hundred before midnight (depending on when you go to bed, how sedentary you are the rest of the night, and which activity level you have MFP on will determine how much your adjustment decreases). The adjustment decreases because MFP expects you to maintain a constant level of activity till midnight and when Fitbit reports that you didn't it brings it expectations down.

    If you are set to Sedentary, then you are seeing a large adjustment because you are actually not even close to Sedentary (most sources say less than 5k steps, MFP seems to only account for around 3k steps at that level...I say around cause it does vary from user to user, but that seems to be where most people start to see a positive adjustment). People set to Sedentary will notice larger adjustments if they aren't actually Sedentary, but they won't lose many calories when they go to bed at night.
  • Emzy1079
    Emzy1079 Posts: 27 Member
    Still makes absolutely no sense to me at all. My Garmin is new after having a Fitbit, must admit I find the Garmin 10 times better, so maybe a bit of play around to get used to it all. Thanks for all your replies. :smile:
  • SezxyStef
    SezxyStef Posts: 15,267 Member
    If you are talking about enabling the negative calorie adjustment in the settings the purpose is for this.

    I set your activity level at sedentary, enable the negative adjustment and when I wake up my calorie goal is at 1400 instead of 1500 because my activity tracker hasn't logged any steps so the "assumption" is that I can't eat as much and as the day goes on the negative adjustment goes away...culminating in typically 300-2500 extra calories to eat (depending on what I am doing 2500 was a day of golfing)...

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