Calculate TDEE using apple watch?

So I got a bit lax with MFP after having a baby, 2 & a bit years later I'm significantly heavier than I'd like to be (around 66kg and I was 55-58kg at my happiest) I'm 161cm. I used to have a fitbit but now an apple watch (series 3)
I run 3-4 times a week (only 5k at the moment though) and I generally at least triple my move goal (walking with a pushchair/running round with toddler on days off, a job that is fairly active on my work days)
My apple watch says my move calories are anything between 750-1800 per day (first day back at work-I did a 5k run walked 3km to and from work and ended up 25000 steps that day), with resting cals around 1700 leading to totals of between 2300-3400?! This seems super high. I used to maintain on around 2200. I get nowhere near these cals added to my MFP cal allowance (which is currently set to around 1500 to lose)

Can anyone advise what I should be using as my TDEE to have a 500cal deficit to lose weight?

Replies

  • nanastaci2020
    nanastaci2020 Posts: 1,072 Member
    edited July 2020
    You can look up BMR calculators online - will enter your height/weight/age/gender to get baseline cals for living. Your stats if age 30: 1355 daily BMR. Higher if younger, a little lower if older.

    You can estimate normal daily activity (not exercise) by adding perhaps 35-40% BMR for the normal daily activity. So perhaps 500-600. You'd use a lower multiplier if sedentary of course. I don't know the exact multipliers that MFP uses. You can get an idea by playing around with your goals. Set MFP to 'maintain' instead of lose weight. That is what MFP calculates as your BMR + Activity for your current setting.

    There are many online calculators to estimate running and/or walking. One I found online that takes a person's size, etc. into consideration says about 291 for 30 minutes @ 10 km/hr and 87 for 30 minutes @ 5 km/hr.

    SO if you ran 4x a week (291 x 4) and did the walk to/from work 5x a week (87 x 10, if I'm reading it right and my pace estimates are somewhat reasonable for you?) would be 2034 exercise calories.

    1355 BMR
    550 Activity
    290 Avg Daily Exercise

    2195 less 500 = 1695

    So your current 1500 daily is probably about right, or consider eating some additional to fuel the exercise especially since your wording makes me think you intend to increase your run distances as you get back in the rythym of things.

    Ps-I'm not familiar w/ Apple watch to know if it is reporting your allday burn (including activity/bmr) or just 'movement'.
  • Duck_Puddle
    Duck_Puddle Posts: 3,224 Member
    Go to the “Activity” app on the phone. Right below the Move calories chart thingy for the day, there’s a “total” calories. That’s what it’s estimating as TDEE. My rest calories are all over the board (Varies by several hundred calories from day to day - so just racking my move calories on to any number would be wildly off for me).

    In a perfect world, if your Apple Watch is linked to mfp, your adjustment will be your Apple Watch total calories minus whatever mfp thinks you’d burn for the day (which I’m guessing is around 2000 if you’re currently set to lose 1 lb/week). The amount mfp thinks you’ll burn for the day includes that 2k (I’m assuming) plus any workouts showing in mfp.

    In the real world, your Apple Watch is just estimating your TDEE and it could be high or low.

    Mfp and Apple Watch don’t always sync well.

    Your best bet is to use one system consistently for 4-6 weeks, and see if you’re losing as expected. If not-make some adjustments and try again.
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 13,554 Member
    Regardless of "feelz", and regardless of synchronization problems between apple and MFP (a long standing workaround is to synchronize apple to Pacer App then Pacer App to MFP, similar workarounds using other apps may exist), a person who is active for 25,000 steps a day is prima facia well above MFPs very active setting which will usually tap out below 16K steps.

    Whether your weight loss supports this or not will depend, greatly, on your food intake logging and on whether you are personally close to the norm, or an outlier. By definition most people are close to the norm, but, hey, MFP *is* full of outliers--and that's not a joke on my part: finding mfp often involves some self selection. But not fueling your combined activity and exercise levels, if such levels of caloric expenditure are usual for you, is going to be a recipe for failure.

    Yes, you're describing activity commensurate with activity factors of 2* BMR, which yes, would put your TDEE closer to 3K than your former 2200, and at or above the top end of most TDEE estimation tools that usually top out between BMR*1.9 and BMR*2.2 at their "most active".

    If the activity is unusual... that's a different story, and that's why MFP carves out your base daily life from your deliberate exercise and considers them separately. This may be appropriate for you. And if you follow this do take into account that exercise calories are often expressed as gross calories and your MFP activity level does include a level of calories for the same time slot.

    But in the end, if you're moving, you're moving and you're spending energy to do so.

    If you decide to use your apple watch as an estimator of your TDEE, I would assume that the documentation will tell you where it will shows your total daily (energy) expenditure. I would think that such a figure would include both non moving and moving calories as a single sum total.

    As already mentioned, if apple can't provide a single number, synchronizing to a third party app may amalgamate the various apple numbers into a single TDEE figure which MFP and my own little brain are more attuned to understanding.

    Due to mixed levels of activity and due to mostly engaging in activities that are well suited to bands, I've long offloaded my TDEE estimation to my Fitbit, and over-time, have validated my numbers to be less than 4% out when taking into account 3+ weeks at a time
  • katiew78
    katiew78 Posts: 24 Member
    Thanks all

    Under my activity trends (so last 3 months) it's got me at 762cals/day, 10.4km/day and 48min/day exercise. I push my toddler in the pushchair to nap (so I've been doing that 5/6 days a week whilst lockdown was happening & I was furloughed/she was off nursery) and it takes 30-60 mins sometimes more :s
    The 25000 was an outlier-I'm a vet, I was consulting for 8 hours in and out of the building to clients in the car park, but yesterday (no run, did walk to work, 13000 steps but its got my total cals at 3290! seems mentally high) I always at least double my move goal (380 cals) unless I'm ill.
    I think I'll stick with 1500 + exercise cals for a few weeks (yesterday apple watch said 3290, MFP gave me an extra 113 on top of my 1500)
    I tried pacer, but then it gave me 2700 cals for the day, which I was probably eating (or drinking :# ) during lockdown, and I definitely DIDN'T lose weight on that, hence back on the MFP bandwagon :D
  • NovusDies
    NovusDies Posts: 8,940 Member
    For the last 180 days I have been running a side by side comparison of what my weight would be if Apple's total is correct vs what my weight would be if MFP + Apple move calories via Pacer is correct. In that time a number of things have muddied my data pool one of which was coming off a diuretic which played havoc with my water weight for a couple of months. However, I did get a match with actual results to MFP results not long ago and I am waiting for another round of whooshing to see if it matches up again.

    The variance between Apple and MFP's totals is almost 3 pounds which means that Apple has been "too high" by an average of 58 calories per day.

    This does not mean that Apple would measure another person as closely.
  • Talan79
    Talan79 Posts: 782 Member
    @katiew78 Pacer helps transmit the data from Apple Watch to MFP since the two don’t integrate well. Not sure what you mean by how many calories Pacer gave you.
    I’m using Pacer and my “move calories” are my adjustment in MFP. I have my activity level in MFP set to “not very active” & my TDEE in MFP and AW are roughy the same daily.
    If you track a workout on your watch and sync to Pacer, you will see two adjustments, one from Pacer, one from Apple Health. Delete the Apple Health bc it’s a double.
  • katiew78
    katiew78 Posts: 24 Member
    Mystery sort of solved. We got new scales and they only synced husbands weight to my apple health. So it's working on the fact I am 100kg rather than 66 :p Today is a much more reasonable TDEE of 2475, yesterday was 2200...
    Funny that B)