Negative calorie adjustment?

Hi

I’m sure this has been asked a lot but I couldn’t find a recent post.

I’ve done a lot of research on the negative calories thing and it’s really confusing me. I have my goal set to lose 1.5 lbs/week and set to lightly active. Which, I think is accurate. I have horses and have a large yard so I do yard work a lot, haul hay, etc. I am never sitting at a desk 8 hours a day.

I have an Apple Watch series 3 that is supposed to track my steps and calories burned. Not sure how accurate they are.

So with negative calories NOT enabled, let’s say that I have a goal of 1200 calories/ day. I run that morning and burn 300. So I should have 1500 calories a day. However with the negative calories it’ll take away 300 (or sometimes more) that I earned from the exercise which is super frustrating!!! And it’ll say I walked 15k steps that day and STILL take away 400 calories. I’m like I’m pretty sure 15k steps a day counts should count as lightly active?? I mean geez.

I’d disable it but I want an accurate count of how much I’m truly burning versus eating. I’m not really losing weight even though I’m sticking pretty close to my calories and wondering if that’s the culprit.

(I weigh 137, trying to get back down to 130 which is where I feel best at.125 would be an awesome goal weight but I’ve all but given up on that dream).

I did just start running every other day a week ago to change my routine up.

Replies

  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 14,240 Member
    Lillymoo01 wrote: »
    Apple Watch doesn't sync well with MFP which is why you can get these bizarre adjustments. Install Pacer to your phone and sync your watch to Pacer and then Pacer to MFP. This will give more accurate numbers.

    Echo-ing the above.

    Also at 15k you're closer to MFP Very Active than anything else.

    With negative adjustments enabled and operating correctly you will probably start with a negative adjustment in the morning and it will disappear and turn into a positive in the afternoon, reducing a bit towards midnight if you stop being active before that.

    Currently (August 2019) it is not operating correctly because the MFP/Apple integration is broken unless you use an intermediary app to translate Apple speak into MFP speak.
  • paniologal
    paniologal Posts: 53 Member
    edited August 2019
    Lillymoo01 wrote: »
    Apple Watch doesn't sync well with MFP which is why you can get these bizarre adjustments. Install Pacer to your phone and sync your watch to Pacer and then Pacer to MFP. This will give more accurate numbers.

    Does Pacer work when you don’t have your phone on you as long as it’s synced with the watch? It is rare but I don’t always have my phone on me during exercise especially yard work

  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 14,240 Member
    It will synchronize when the phone and watch are back in range I would think. Since you are only linking Pacer to MFP (and removing all direct links to Apple) this will just leave your MFP calories un-updated while you're un-synced. But at least you won't be getting WRONG synchronizations with your exercise deducting calories instead of adding them.