Do you ever comment on unrealistic logging by friends?
Replies
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I saw someone log 1000 calories for 'mowing the lawn'.
But, nope, not my business.1 -
I do not.
I don’t actually use MFP to track my exercise. I usually log my runs but only to have a log of my times. I know I didn’t burn as many calories as MFP says I did, I would incredibly annoyed if someone kept commenting on my logs pointing that out and would probably just delete them as a friend.
If someone asks for help/guidance the sure mention it but otherwise you don’t know their mindset and what they may be using those numbers/tracking for.2 -
annaskiski wrote: »I saw someone log 1000 calories for 'mowing the lawn'.
But, nope, not my business.
Big lawn, push mower?
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Tacklewasher wrote: »annaskiski wrote: »I saw someone log 1000 calories for 'mowing the lawn'.
But, nope, not my business.
Big lawn, push mower?
I considered that, still skeptical...0 -
I have only commented on those who asked specifically for feedback when they requested me as a friend. And that's only two people. They were both very open to the comments.
Otherwise, no. I have unfriended a couple people who were giving crappy advice, posting inflated calorie burns and dubious dieting science.4 -
Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't.
Friends whether IRL or virtual friends helping one another with advice from areas of experience or knowledge doesn't seem an odd behaviour at all.
A lot of people, quite understandably, are clueless about estimating exercise burns and may well benefit from a nudge in the right direction such as not using HRMs for strength training calorie estimates, not using MapMyCompleteFantasyBurn app for anything but distance, which cardio machines to trust etc etc.
No one is obligated to take advice after all.
A bit like an extension of the community forums sharing knowledge and experience but on a personal level.4 -
How does one decide what is unrealistic and what isn't? This whole idea of this conversion seems a bit presumptuous to me.5
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How does one decide what is unrealistic and what isn't? This whole idea of this conversion seems a bit presumptuous to me.
Sometimes it's just obvious. I saw someone, whose stats were known, post a calorie burn of 800 calories for 30 minutes of a moderate activity. There was no way that was even close.
Can it be presumptuous, sure. But, it can also be simply applying experience.
ETA: she was happy for the correction and it helped her in the end.3 -
Speaking as a newbie, don’t be too harsh. A lot of users are probably like me. I am utterly confused by all the nonstop oceans of data. I feel like I’m drowning in it: the incorrect calories I see on some of the MFP entries, the data that my scale sends via Bluetooth, the crazy “burn” numbers I see on mapmyrun, the totally different numbers from my new Apple Watch (thought that might be more accurate but it just confuses things worse) and then the figures that “sync” to MFP seem to be off in their own little numerical world. I can’t even figure out where they come from. They don’t seem to relate to anything else. So I simply stick to trying to eat healthier and keep under 1500 calories per day, and mentally pat myself on the back when the activity or excercise monitor in the watch app circles around for the third or fourth rotation and know that at least it means I’m “moving more/eating less”. As long as the weight continues to come off, I guess it’s all good. Otherwise you’d go all OCD and drive yourself nuts.
I’m going to see a dietician tomorrow for reassurance.16 -
How does one decide what is unrealistic and what isn't? This whole idea of this conversion seems a bit presumptuous to me.
Calorie burns that would go over 1000 per hour for moderately intense (and sometimes not even intense) exercise. 150+ calories per mile for miles computed from daily steps. My original question was sincere, not wanting to ridicule people. I see posted activity that would wipe out a daily deficit of 500 calories sometimes. It is entirely possible that some of these people don't know.9 -
I try not to but the other day on FB I couldn't help myself and had to comment. I had a friend selling BB who was claiming she burnt over 900 calories dancing for 30-45 minutes. This woman is not morbidly obese and there is just no way. While I love the BB workouts for when I can't hit the gym I'm not ok with false claims like this being used to trick friends into buying stuff so I made a comment about how she must be magic since I burnt less than half of that running a 5k the day before at a 9:20 mile pace and averaged around 450 cals burned for a full hour of boxing (which is one of the highest cal burners out there)8
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Part of the issue is with the MFP calorie estimators for exercise, which seem to be in active conflict with their activity multipliers. For instance, lets take a 30 year old, 5'4, 160 pound woman. BMR would be 1431, which means that if someone defined themselves as Sedentary, they would have a normal burn of 1717. Now lets say that person does house cleaning for a living. They have 2 options. They could choose their activity level as either "active" or "highly active", which would give them another 500-700 calories per day of budgeting. Or they could log 480 minutes of "Cleaning, light, moderate effort", which would likely say that they burned about 3x the calories than if they included that as part of their activity level.
So I think a big issue with calorie logging is that logging basic household activities greatly overestimates the number of calories burned. Exercise is not meant to be done for hours. If a person finds themselves doing hours of a life related exercise on the regular, they should raise their activity level, rather than logging it as exercise. Exercise should be for specific acts of exercise outside of normal daily activity.
Huh? Why not? And who didn't mean for us to exercise for hours?
Yesterday I spent about 3.5 hours riding my bike up and down Sherman Pass. The day before I rode Loup Loup Pass, which coincidentally also took me about 3.5 hours. I work as a software engineer so sedentary is the correct activity level. Today it's stormy and the weekday riding is over.11 -
I stay out of it unless they specifically ask me the age old "Why am I not losing weight?" Then I might point out their calorie burns look a little suspect.2
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CarvedTones wrote: »How does one decide what is unrealistic and what isn't? This whole idea of this conversion seems a bit presumptuous to me.
Calorie burns that would go over 1000 per hour for moderately intense (and sometimes not even intense) exercise. 150+ calories per mile for miles computed from daily steps. My original question was sincere, not wanting to ridicule people. I see posted activity that would wipe out a daily deficit of 500 calories sometimes. It is entirely possible that some of these people don't know.
I've done that before.. 1000 cals (ish) for an hour of cycling, moderate or whatever the equivalent is. It's because it was auto-logged when my garmin synced... but there was nothing moderate about it that ride, I promise you.
And that was more my point. Yes, I'm sure there are plenty of hugely erroneous entries made every single day. But I also think that there are just as many (if not more) variables, unknowns, variations, etc that reading a simple diary entry and assuming it's wrong is just as likely to be arrogant and unhelpful as it is considerate and beneficial.
But that's me, and I don't people very well... so maybe this is just something else I'm overly jaded about.4 -
NorthCascades wrote: »Part of the issue is with the MFP calorie estimators for exercise, which seem to be in active conflict with their activity multipliers. For instance, lets take a 30 year old, 5'4, 160 pound woman. BMR would be 1431, which means that if someone defined themselves as Sedentary, they would have a normal burn of 1717. Now lets say that person does house cleaning for a living. They have 2 options. They could choose their activity level as either "active" or "highly active", which would give them another 500-700 calories per day of budgeting. Or they could log 480 minutes of "Cleaning, light, moderate effort", which would likely say that they burned about 3x the calories than if they included that as part of their activity level.
So I think a big issue with calorie logging is that logging basic household activities greatly overestimates the number of calories burned. Exercise is not meant to be done for hours. If a person finds themselves doing hours of a life related exercise on the regular, they should raise their activity level, rather than logging it as exercise. Exercise should be for specific acts of exercise outside of normal daily activity.
Huh? Why not? And who didn't mean for us to exercise for hours?
Yesterday I spent about 3.5 hours riding my bike up and down Sherman Pass. The day before I rode Loup Loup Pass, which coincidentally also took me about 3.5 hours. I work as a software engineer so sedentary is the correct activity level. Today it's stormy and the weekday riding is over.
I'd find it very difficult to train for a marathon without exercising for hours.10 -
How does one decide what is unrealistic and what isn't? This whole idea of this conversion seems a bit presumptuous to me.
Using one's experience it's sometimes painfully obvious that calorie burns are massively exaggerated. For example when you see an unfit newbie to cycling logging rates and quantities of calorie burns that would do a Tour de France rider proud.
Rather than let someone fail by themselves isn't it more friendly to offer some advice?
"A wise man learns from their mistakes, a clever man learns from the mistakes of others."4 -
janejellyroll wrote: »NorthCascades wrote: »Part of the issue is with the MFP calorie estimators for exercise, which seem to be in active conflict with their activity multipliers. For instance, lets take a 30 year old, 5'4, 160 pound woman. BMR would be 1431, which means that if someone defined themselves as Sedentary, they would have a normal burn of 1717. Now lets say that person does house cleaning for a living. They have 2 options. They could choose their activity level as either "active" or "highly active", which would give them another 500-700 calories per day of budgeting. Or they could log 480 minutes of "Cleaning, light, moderate effort", which would likely say that they burned about 3x the calories than if they included that as part of their activity level.
So I think a big issue with calorie logging is that logging basic household activities greatly overestimates the number of calories burned. Exercise is not meant to be done for hours. If a person finds themselves doing hours of a life related exercise on the regular, they should raise their activity level, rather than logging it as exercise. Exercise should be for specific acts of exercise outside of normal daily activity.
Huh? Why not? And who didn't mean for us to exercise for hours?
Yesterday I spent about 3.5 hours riding my bike up and down Sherman Pass. The day before I rode Loup Loup Pass, which coincidentally also took me about 3.5 hours. I work as a software engineer so sedentary is the correct activity level. Today it's stormy and the weekday riding is over.
I'd find it very difficult to train for a marathon without exercising for hours.
Right? Just the marathon takes several hours (for me). Training is....omg hours.
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It depends - for someone who's new and seems friendly, I'll say something like:
"Nice workout - how are you measuring your calorie burn? It seems kind of high, and a lot of calorie burn estimators tend to way overestimate. If you don't get the results you expect on the scale you may want to try a different calculator."
And I leave it at that. People have been happy to get the feedback.
If it's someone who's been on forever and records 1000 calories for 30 minutes of "Housekeeping, light, doing the dishes," I don't comment.4 -
I rarely comment on anything in my news feed. The software is so archaic that it borders on useless.
As for calorie burns, I don't manually log anything - my Garmin autoposts them, so it is what it is. I consider the figures for steady state cardio to be in the ballpark and all the others to be some degree of dubious, since I understand the limitations of correlating HR to calorie expenditure.7 -
annaskiski wrote: »I saw someone log 1000 calories for 'mowing the lawn'.
But, nope, not my business.
I have a guy who does that. He’s about 8 feet tall, and is mowing a little over an acre with a push mower.
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CarvedTones wrote: »Sometimes I see things in my news feed and think about trying to politely say there is no way in he11 you burned that many calories in that much time doing that activity, but I never do. If it was an IRL friend, I would say something as politely as I could. Here, I just shake my head and ignore it. Sometimes I wonder if I should say something; maybe they really have no idea. OTOH, I don't want to come across as a know it all jerk.
Nope. Not my place to get into a debate about someone's habits. Do I think the guy who burns 20 calories a minute for the entire duration of his several hours workout is overestimating his burn? Yep. Do I say anything? Nope. I also have a MFP friend who engaged in a 29 day water fast. Was supposed to be 30. Couldn't watch that happen. So destructive. But people were cheering her on. I couldn't. But I didn't dis her, either.1 -
I don't have any friends and no I would not. It's not my business or my concern.2
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CarvedTones wrote: »How does one decide what is unrealistic and what isn't? This whole idea of this conversion seems a bit presumptuous to me.
Calorie burns that would go over 1000 per hour for moderately intense (and sometimes not even intense) exercise. 150+ calories per mile for miles computed from daily steps. My original question was sincere, not wanting to ridicule people. I see posted activity that would wipe out a daily deficit of 500 calories sometimes. It is entirely possible that some of these people don't know.
I've done that before.. 1000 cals (ish) for an hour of cycling, moderate or whatever the equivalent is. It's because it was auto-logged when my garmin synced... but there was nothing moderate about it that ride, I promise you.
And that was more my point. Yes, I'm sure there are plenty of hugely erroneous entries made every single day. But I also think that there are just as many (if not more) variables, unknowns, variations, etc that reading a simple diary entry and assuming it's wrong is just as likely to be arrogant and unhelpful as it is considerate and beneficial.
But that's me, and I don't people very well... so maybe this is just something else I'm overly jaded about.
The Mayo clinic compiled a big list of exercise burns for activities and for a person weighing 200 pounds, the two activities they found that were over 1,000 calories per hour were running 8 miles in an hour and, believe it or not, jumping rope. I think there are more that might average that or higher for bursts. I would think racing cyclists doing a climb might burn 300 in 15 minutes, but that's an exertion level that would be difficult to keep doing for an hour. Maybe pro racers could, but I am not talking about elite athletes.
I do get the point a lot of people made about auto logged activities though. I had forgotten that the post "sticks" even when you correct the calories. Machines which seem to have enough info to come close are disappointing in their accuracy also. I did an hour on the ARCTrainer this morning with resistance at 47 and elevation only at 6. I entered my weight accurately as 157. It gifted me with ~800 calories. I logged 375.0 -
Duck_Puddle wrote: »janejellyroll wrote: »NorthCascades wrote: »Part of the issue is with the MFP calorie estimators for exercise, which seem to be in active conflict with their activity multipliers. For instance, lets take a 30 year old, 5'4, 160 pound woman. BMR would be 1431, which means that if someone defined themselves as Sedentary, they would have a normal burn of 1717. Now lets say that person does house cleaning for a living. They have 2 options. They could choose their activity level as either "active" or "highly active", which would give them another 500-700 calories per day of budgeting. Or they could log 480 minutes of "Cleaning, light, moderate effort", which would likely say that they burned about 3x the calories than if they included that as part of their activity level.
So I think a big issue with calorie logging is that logging basic household activities greatly overestimates the number of calories burned. Exercise is not meant to be done for hours. If a person finds themselves doing hours of a life related exercise on the regular, they should raise their activity level, rather than logging it as exercise. Exercise should be for specific acts of exercise outside of normal daily activity.
Huh? Why not? And who didn't mean for us to exercise for hours?
Yesterday I spent about 3.5 hours riding my bike up and down Sherman Pass. The day before I rode Loup Loup Pass, which coincidentally also took me about 3.5 hours. I work as a software engineer so sedentary is the correct activity level. Today it's stormy and the weekday riding is over.
I'd find it very difficult to train for a marathon without exercising for hours.
Right? Just the marathon takes several hours (for me). Training is....omg hours.
There was a lady here a while ago who was convinced that it was impossible to burn more than 200 calories a day. You'd have to be an ant to run a marathon!
I do try to say something when it seems like people have a misunderstanding of how things work. Once upon a time I thought you couldn't lose weight of you ate "bad food." Learning that that judgement fairy didn't make people fat for enjoying a cookie was a big deal for me.7 -
I echo the "It's none of my business" philosophy. People are subject to human emotions. Like not accurately logging every morsel we eat so the log stays under daily allowances. We fool ourselves a little all the time. If it gets you through another day, then good on you. The truth is is an unblinking eye. The mirror/ scale will be our undoing.4
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Erinloveable wrote: »One of my "friends" adjusted their calorie limit by thousands of calories everyday so it always said they were under their calorie limit for the day on people's walls. I just unfriended them. That kind of delusion and/or trickery is the enemy of weight loss and made me feel a bit weird. You can't control what people do, you only control what you do and I am not gonna bust people I barely know for being dishonest, that's a bad time.
I don't get why people waste time doing things like this? If they want weight loss then it all comes back to being really honest with yourself and not caring what others think. I just don't get this competitive mentality, especially when it is based on a delusion. We get further lifting one another up then undermining one another. I totally would have unfriended that person as well.
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Just looking at my own behavior I'm a lazy logger and primarily concerned with calories, then protein. If I know I'm logging an item not in my database ~300 calories and I'm logging something similar I'll just add a variable so it amounts to an added 300 calories. For activity I keep it simple and just log from the Fitbit or Polar, but I can imagine people questioning the accuracy of this.1
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On the flip side of that, when I used to log, it was annoying going from barely being able to jog for 20 minutes to doing an hour of hard cardio and people questioning you burning over 600 or 700 calories in that hour. It took me nearly 10 years of training to get to this point, but I do regularly burn over 600 to 700 calories on a moderate hour and more on a hard hour. Part of the reason I stopped logging exercise on weight loss sites and now do it on rowing forums where people are used to seeing those types of numbers (and I've just very average on those sites).6
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Occasionally I’ll do something besides running, maybe hike, walk or roller blade and I know MFP has given me a ridiculous calorie amount. The thing is I know that, so I only eat back half those calories. I’d probably laugh if someone commented on my status to tell me I didn’t burn that much. No duh.
However I do see people logging horseback riding for 10,000 calories and I always wonder if they’re calculating it for the horse 🤔.5 -
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