Converting steps to more calories available

If by chance you Use Apple Watch to track your steps, go to main menu, then steps and make sure it’s set to post steps from your watch and not your phone.

I don’t always carry a phone.

Mine had accidentally reverted to report from phone and resulted in MFP shorting me as many as 13,000 steps a day.

I noticed this morning when the weekly “update health app permissions” popped up, there’s a teensy weensy insignificant bar underneath that’s easy to tap by mistake which says “don’t read steps from Apple Watch”.

I think that’s the source of the problem.

Yes, you're supposed to eat back at least a part of the exercise calories. Other calorie calculators give you your daily calories including exercise, MFP does without and you add it later.

But a couple of questions to you:
For how long have you been at it?
Do you weigh daily and have you really not lost anything at all? Does the weight on the scale change?
How do you measure your food intake? Spoons and cups, scale, guessing?
how much do you have to lose?

So on busy day you got an 1195 calories from all those logged activities.

So all that 309 min, over 5 hrs of activity now logged separately - should NOT have your normally accounted for MFP activity level of calorie burn counted - right?

Let's say your BMR is 1400 and Sedentary (Not Very Active) level means 1750 daily burn, or MFP expects 73 cal an hour and that's what your eating level is based on (with deficit, at maintenance, whatever).

73 x 5 hrs = 365 calories of normally accounted for MFP rate of burn has been totally replaced by the activities you logged.
Better not add them to a Sedentary rate of burn, because you weren't sedentary during that 5+ hours.

So at the least, nothing else considered - 365 calories should be removed from MFP expected daily burn 1750 being sedentary + 1195 workout calories = 2945 - 365 replaced sedentary calories = 2580.

That is the super simple math that many of us comment we wished MFP would do automatically.
If you are adding Gross calories which has a BMR in it, then the MFP base calories with BMR AND activity level calories should be removed, so no doubling up of some calories.
MFP does do that math a tad better with merely using a device as a step source and having workouts logged.

It does it really great if you are linked to an activity tracker account that sends over it's estimate of your daily burn. Then MFP's math totally replaces it's own estimate of daily burn with the tracker's figure. (sadly Apple doesn't send that figure - they send their pretty close Sedentary figure)

So that neg 385 is totally inline with the simple math of what should occur.

It's a tad off because MFP is also roughly estimating how many of those 21,882 steps were part of your expected and already accounted for daily activity. 4K, 5K?
I would hope they are doing some rough estimates of stride length based on height & gender, getting a distance, and calorie burn from that. That keeps it somewhat individual at least.

So on top of some steps not counting towards extra calories anyway - you now have workouts that MFP has no idea if they contained some of those steps, and therefore extra calories, that it shouldn't be counting twice.
Some has to be removed there.

And on top of all that - there is the effect that many experience on big workout days - rest of the day you move less than average, in other words less-than-sedentary for more time than normal.
But on your lighter workout day - you still got a lot of steps in!

Although my eyeballs roll around like marbles while reading this stuff, I get you to a degree.

The puzzlement to me though is, seems like the “active” adjustment should come on the top end.

But the less I do, the smaller my penalty is. The more I do, the more the penalty.

It just seems logical to start out, maybe with the full 20%, and either keep it there, or reduce the penalty the more you do.

I’ve noticed with Apple, negative calories adjustments aka “penalties” in my thick skull are smaller on heavy walking days, but huge on days full of classes. And I still walk on those days, too- some recorded, some not.

I also still don’t get credit for about 8-10% of steps, although I’m set to record steps from Watch. My home page will show all the steps accurately, but the diary page shows a thousand or two or three less, no matter how often I sync or reopen the app. There’s a disconnect within the app that it recognizes steps in one place and not the other.

It’s also frustrating to not have negative adjustment update quickly. I’ll look at the diary and be 500 over and have an unplanned snack to get cals up, only to discover an hour later that the NCA was increased another 140, and now I’m hovering just below par.

It’s all academic. I’m maintaining, but I’m a dot dot dot OCD person, and these all seems so easily repairable.