Negative adjustments

tinkerbellang83 wrote: »

Can't remember on the app, but on web it's in here https://www.myfitnesspal.com/account/diary_settings

The benefit of negative adjustments is that if at the end of the day you're unlikely to meet your normal activity level it adjusts your calorie allowance accordingly so you don't end up overeating.

For example if you're set to Lightly Active it might expect you to take around 5-7000 steps across the day. If you spend most of one particular day sitting on your *kitten* watching netflix and have say 500 steps by 3pm in the afternoon when you sync your device, it will predict you're not going to make enough steps to hit the expected activity level and will deduct exercise calories.

Quoted for truth! I had negative adjustments off for a long time even though I wore a fitbit daily and the burns on the Fitbit app seem very accurate to me. Everyday I was getting anywhere from 400-900 extra calories for exercise on MFP, which didn't seem to align with Fitbit but I was just going along with what MFP said. I have a spreadsheet that I track all my data on and when I compared my fitbit data to my MFP data over the course of 6 months, it showed that I lost 22 pounds but should've lost 41 (just on the math alone.) I track daily and weigh all my food, and I could believe maybe being 5 lbs off during that period, but definitely not nearly double.

It turned out that I do all my exercise early in the day (I walk about a mile to work), but then I get home and I'm a potato. So MFP was waaaay overshooting my estimated burn. I enabled negative adjustments, and now MFP is pretty much dead-on accurate with what I found through my math (average TDEE of 2155, NOT 2500ish). I just wish it hadn't taken me six months to figure that out, smh.