Negative Calorie Adjustment, Is This Accurate?

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kayla59358
kayla59358 Posts: 1 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
Hi All,

I just recently turned on my negative calorie adjustment and I'm a bit confused about the display. Is the negative adjustment how many calories I've over spent, or what I'm lacking according to this? Why does it have a "0" under exercise? Any information is helpful!

Replies

  • quiksylver296
    quiksylver296 Posts: 28,442 Member
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    Did you log any exercise?

    Right now that says you haven't done any exercise and you are 438 calories over goal for that day.
  • WinoGelato
    WinoGelato Posts: 13,454 Member
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    So you entered exercise for circuit training and running? Why running? FitBit counts your step based activities and syncs with MFP. Also did you just do this and just get the screen shot? Sometimes it takes a bit for the two systems to resync after you’ve made a manual entry. Plus FitBit and MFP are having issues right now.
  • malibu927
    malibu927 Posts: 17,565 Member
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    Negative adjustment is to adjust for when you have a day where you burn less than your maintenance calories. This is just an adjustment for what you logged in exercise to override what Fitbit says you burned for those time periods. That said, you should just let your Fitbit take care of all exercise...it's meant to track running/walking, and you can log circuit training on there.
  • SCoil123
    SCoil123 Posts: 2,108 Member
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    I believe you are getting that because your are double logging your activity. If Fitbit is synced than you do not need to add workouts into MFP, the system looks at it as double logging activity. Try logging activity only through Fitbit and food only through MFP when synced. I think it will work better for you
  • Francl27
    Francl27 Posts: 26,372 Member
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    Fitbit isn't synchronizing right now, so that's probably your problem. Typically I start the day at -84 and it's only shown 0 since last night.
  • malibu927
    malibu927 Posts: 17,565 Member
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    SCoil123 wrote: »
    I believe you are getting that because your are double logging your activity. If Fitbit is synced than you do not need to add workouts into MFP, the system looks at it as double logging activity. Try logging activity only through Fitbit and food only through MFP when synced. I think it will work better for you

    Even when Fitbit is working correctly it isn't double logging. MFP adjusts the calories received from Fitbit to compensate for the exercises logged.
  • SCoil123
    SCoil123 Posts: 2,108 Member
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    malibu927 wrote: »
    SCoil123 wrote: »
    I believe you are getting that because your are double logging your activity. If Fitbit is synced than you do not need to add workouts into MFP, the system looks at it as double logging activity. Try logging activity only through Fitbit and food only through MFP when synced. I think it will work better for you

    Even when Fitbit is working correctly it isn't double logging. MFP adjusts the calories received from Fitbit to compensate for the exercises logged.

    I know they are supposed to work that way but it hasn’t been my experience that they consistently do. I had similar issues to the OP when I was logging my activity both ways. Now mine works fine
  • Semele0
    Semele0 Posts: 114 Member
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    The circuit training cals + running cals are 335, exactly the calories that the fitbit app took away, so that's why you have 0 as a total. If I understand it well, if you put in you activity level that you are, let's say, lightly active, and then fitbit tracks that in that day you were below the quantity of activity needed to be in the activity level, then it will subtract the difference in calories.
  • xvolution
    xvolution Posts: 721 Member
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    I've been finding that on some devices, it overexaggerates the negative calorie counts by a huge margin, especially if you do actual exercise. I have a Gear S3 and whenever I do actual exercise my calorie counts tend to go really high into the negatives (it was -1800 calories yesterday, which would have put me at only eating 1000 calories for the day).
  • mutantspicy
    mutantspicy Posts: 624 Member
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    There is known bug they are aware. And are trying to fix it. It doesn't matter what kind of exercise you log it kills your step count, and if you have neg cal adj turned on your entire step count goes negative.

  • ritzvin
    ritzvin Posts: 2,860 Member
    edited May 2018
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    At least with the Garmin, if you manually log something (either within MFP or Garmin) that the tracker can't quantify, it will not be included in the total used to reconcile (and that activity will be negated away). It used to do this even with cycling activities that were measured with the Garmin (The step tracker side of the server didn't work all that seamlessly with the normal activity tracker side).

    Fitbit may work differently however. (Presumably it should handle this better than Garmin..step tracking was kind of an after-thought addition to the Garmin triathlon watches rather than their main thing).

    In my case, I had set my activity level to sedentary so I just disabled the negative adjustments (any true negative adjustments for 'slug-mode days' would have been very small since it was already set to sedentary).

    • Were you wearing the Fitbit when doing those activities? Fitbit won't count them if it didn't see them.
    • Did the Fitbit have reason to think you were doing something more strenuous than the step counter would assume? (this could account for negating the circuit training, but not the running - activity vs step tracking on that should be pretty close to on par).
    • What did you set your activity level to? (It will only give a positive adjustment if total calories burned seen by the Fitbit is higher than your activity level estimate in MFP)
  • mutantspicy
    mutantspicy Posts: 624 Member
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    Semele0 wrote: »
    The circuit training cals + running cals are 335, exactly the calories that the fitbit app took away, so that's why you have 0 as a total. If I understand it well, if you put in you activity level that you are, let's say, lightly active, and then fitbit tracks that in that day you were below the quantity of activity needed to be in the activity level, then it will subtract the difference in calories.

    If you notice the OP took 18000 steps which is way over any activity level. As I stated in another thread. I've been having a similar issue. I contacted tech support and they responded with


    S Health Step Count issue when logging exercise
    mutantspicy — May 14, 2018 08:52PM PDT

    I have a Gear S3 connect to S Health which is connected to MFP. The step counts works fine until I manually track an exercise with S Health. If manually track a walk or run or yoga session or weight lifting, I lose my entire step count it goes to zero or if negative adjustments are on it goes negative and the more steps I take the more negative it goes. There is a serious bug going on.

    Do you have any idea why this is happening? it just started late last week.



    2 Community Answers


    Best Answer May 15, 2018 08:05AM PDT
    Maximiliano

    Hello,

    We are aware of the problem, and are currently working on a resolution.

    For now we would suggest not manually entering in exercises like this.

    We hope to have a fix in place as soon as possible. Please accept our sincerest apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused. We appreciate your patience and understanding.

    Warm Regards,
    Maximiliano
    MyFitnessPal Staff

    The good news is that they are aware and hopefully get it sorted. This issue started for me around Thursday last week.

  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 13,639 Member
    edited May 2018
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    The issues that Samsung and Apple have with negative Calories have not been an issue with Fitbit and bringing the issues up is not addressing the OP.

    Exercise entered manually on mfp overwrites what Fitbit detected during the same time period.

    There is no double count when integration is working because the two programs sort things out.

    However I would suggest that unless you WANT to make a manual over ride to what Fitbit detected during a particular time period you should not insert custom (i.e. MFP) exercises into the mix.

    Negative adjustment takes away calories when your MFP total exceeds your Fitbit total (projected by mfp to end of day)

    Positive adjustments seen as "exercise" calories add to your MFP eating targets when your MFP total calories spent are less than your Fitbit daily total calories spent (projected by mfp to end of day)

    All this assumes integration is working. This is not necessarily the case right now.

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