Garmin and MFP over shooting calories?

summpear
summpear Posts: 77 Member
edited November 26 in Health and Weight Loss
I'm new to MFP and I'm trying to figure out my calories. When I registered with MFP, I put my basic activity at moderately active. I work out 6-8 hours a week with a combo of cardio, weights, and yoga. My job has me on my feet a lot on days I work and can be physically demanding. The days I don't work I'm more sedentary but still fairly active - I almost always clear 10k steps a day without specifically trying.

My question: MFP has given me a goal of 1830 calories. But it also wants to give me the calories I work off, for both my steps and my workouts. Aren't those the very things that make me moderately active? If I drop my activity to lightly active, my calorie goal drops to 1500s.

16-1900 feels pretty good. I'm not hungry, I'm getting good protein levels, etc. But if I followed MFP I "should" be eating over 2000 calories most days, which I can't wrap my brain around.

And no, I haven't been tracking long enough to see how upping or downing my calories affects my weight loss efforts.

Replies

  • tinkerbellang83
    tinkerbellang83 Posts: 9,142 Member
    My base calories are 1800 when I was using my Garmin for running, walking and weights I ate 100% of my adjustment back and lost as expected my gross calories for the day would be around 2400.

    You don't have to eat a high volume of food to eat higher calorie, just incorporare some more calorie dense foods like oils, nuts, etc.
  • sijomial
    sijomial Posts: 19,809 Member
    Your purposeful exercise is completely excluded from your activity setting - you could have a sedentary job/lifestyle but do loads of exercise or highly active job/lifestyle and do no exercise, or any other combination!

    Your steps could be a bit of both though - you have steps that are part of your normal lifestyle and job, these are definitely a major contributor to your activity setting but you could also be walking specifically for exercise.

    Be careful to use the right estimating tool for the right exercise - for example don't base calorie estimates for weights workouts on heart rate or they are likely to be very inflated.

    Without knowing your height and weight it's impossible to know if 2000 is a lot for you - it's often stated as an average amount for whatever an average female is. You are more active and do more exercise than average I would assume.

    In the end whether you start from "over 2000" or "1600-1900" after at least a month you will have a better idea if those numbers works for you in terms of both weight loss and adherence.
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 14,307 Member
    You may think you are a moderately active person; but a 10k plus step person is actually an active person.

    You Garmin and MFP are telling our that your Garmin thinks you spend more calories than you've told MFP you do.

    Whether it will prove to be right or not is another story. On average for the mythical average person these devices are averagely right!

    Log. Look at your results over time. adjust.

    That said, I don't know that you have any a priori reason to distrust your Garmin.
  • Poisonedpawn78
    Poisonedpawn78 Posts: 1,145 Member
    In the end whatever you do is just a starting point. You need or should pay attention to your actual results over longer periods of time and make the appropriate adjustments for YOU personally.
  • blearyspecs
    blearyspecs Posts: 21 Member
    Personally, I disable step tracking in the MFP app which takes out the calorie adjustment, and I only keep track of calories burned from actual activities I recorded. I don't trust the "calorie adjustment" at all.
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 14,307 Member
    edited April 2018
    blearyspecs wrote: »
    Personally, I disable step tracking in the MFP app which takes out the calorie adjustment, and I only keep track of calories burned from actual activities I recorded. I don't trust the "calorie adjustment" at all.

    Why is your self edited recording of your exercise intensity more trust-worthy than what is automatically recorded by a device that is indifferent to how you're feeling about things but just records the acceleration, movement, and vibration that it is subjected to and (possibly) your physiological response during the same time frame and then reverse processes all this into calories spent?

    What happens during the rest of the day when you have, a priory, decided how much you're going to move around and told MFP "I am lightly active", thus MFP spits out a number based on you being at a single activity level for 1440 minutes every 24 hours VS a band that sits there and collects all acceleration and movement and vibration information and then averages your activity using smaller variable time periods (Fitbit does 5 minutes, I am sure others use their own methods). So 5 minutes of total inactivity get a different caloric value than 5 minutes of walking around... which one has a higher chance of being accurate do you think?

    Of course, the accuracy of your food intake logging, and how close you are to the mythical average person described by the various equations, has as much or more to do with whether you will see the results you expect over time.

    But why do you trust your own manual caloric adjustment better than an automated impersonal system with a higher level of granularity than you can apply?

    You still get to adjust based on actual results over a period of weeks and based on your weight trend over time. But I think that adjusting from the basis of an external input is better than adjusting from my own potentially biased input.
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