What about using Apple Watch "Move" calories?

In MFP you chose an activity level, which in turn helps set your daily calorie allotment.

This already takes into account your typical daily movement, outside of exercise.

MFP is correct in not adding calories from your move circle.

If you don’t feel like you’re getting enough “credit” for movement, you need to adjust your activity level.

MFP doesn’t record any credit from calories burned via Apple Watch unless it’s an exercise your specifically started and ended, in which case it should apply your additional calories.

This is what my Apple exercises look like on MFP today. The repetition is not a mistake. I started with half an hour on a recumbent bike, ran 1.5 miles (I record itas a walk because I’m so darned slow), did a hot mat class, ran another 1.5 exact same route, and then did a second hot class.

There’s zero credit for any other iOS calorie adjustment, including the mile and a half I walked to the studio/bike path and back home through the farmers market.

And of course, you have to have given your watch/phone permission to sync with MFP.

Disconnect MFP from Apple and Apple from MFP. Sign on off scrub repeat till each is verified to be home alone

Connect apple to intermediary app that can concatenate the info received from Apple into a single whole day TDEE figure and send that tdee figure to mfp

MFP expects a time stamped TDEE expenditure to the point of time stamp, and the final one at midnight

Past research by heybales indicates that the Pacer app does that.

I am sure other apps exist too.

not having an Apple watch and no longer logging on MFP, I will continue using Fitbit which by the way works most of the time with MFP : lol:

Set up automatic synchronization of the intermediary app with mfp.


**Since I've noticed less of these cannot connect to Apple posts there is a chance that newer apples are working better. The above work around maybe worthwhile only for people for who things are still not working properly

@heybales ?

For that same day - can you press and hold on that line that says Apple Watch calorie adjustment - 2nd page there that gives some other stats?

From the figure of 0 extra calories, it would appear none of those steps occurred outside exercise.
Do you have Negative Cal adjustment enabled?

Interesting point you make that Apple doesn't increase exercise if you don't start a workout, it just counts it as extra daily Move calories.

Move calories are those burned beyond a base sedentary level.

But they don't count on MPF as OP observed.
What if you have a massively busy day moving people, what if your job was similar?
Not exercise, just your daily life.

Where is MFP informed of those calories burned, do they not count?
Is 400 burned in exercise different than 400 burned in extra daily activity?

To the OP - good observation, because Apple doesn't send the correct info. (hopefully that will become clear with 1 extra screen shot - I've asked about 6 times lately and never been given the extra info to show it)

@springlering62 to me it looks as if your watch is transferring exercises but not calories that occur outside of formal exercise.

If you had negative calories enabled you would be getting reductions of total calories every time you exercised

In other words your watch/you are ignoring the collection of all day information and choosing a self selected general activity level on MFP (even though you use a tracker that could provide more granular information) which you then modify by specific exercises.

For example, what happens if instead of a timed exercise you just walked for 8 hours through four airports carrying your luggage from gate to gate without using a cart?

Based on what I see you would still only get your mfp general activity level and none of the calories spent by walking for 8 hours carrying luggage!

springlering62 wrote: »

But wouldn’t that be part of my general activity level? If it’s something I’d expect to be doing anyway, as part of living my life? Some days it might be the airport, some days it might be putting out heavy folding signs for ArtWalk all over the CBD, other days I make three round trip walks to yoga studio and gym, and maybe a fourth up to the market food court to pick up dinner. That’s just life, and I accommodate it via activity level settings?

I can see how this could work for you, so I'm not criticizing.

I think that some other people want their device synch to validate or override their activity level setting, so that if their non-exercise activity is meaningfully different from their selected activity level, the synch will reconcile that at the level of a day's TDEE.

Some other devices seem to send that all-day calorie number to MFP, and if a person synchs that device with negative adjustments enabled, the end result goal will be the same whether the MFP profile setting is sedentary/not very active, or highly active. At those extremes, they'd just get a bigger or smaller calorie adjustment, if their activity level setting was different (at either extreme) from the daily TDEE their device estimated.

PAV8888 wrote: »

So do you change your activity level daily? Today I'm on track for 30,000( steps. Yesterday it was under 5,000.

That's MFP sedentary to well above MFP very active (as far above as the difference between sedentary and very active approximately)

It's just easier to capture on a device than change settings daily... (Or you would have to mess with a custom exercise to capture) and it shouldn't really be ignored in terms of fueling your activities.... 🤷🏻

I don’t change settings daily. I just keep it at highly active.

As with tracking macros, I’ve discovered that seven day calorie averages give me a better picture. I might have a low calorie-to-exercise day like yesterday, and then eat more, like today, when I feel the scale getting uncomfortably low again.

I’m fairly confident with what my watch is reporting. It seems in line with, say, walking or running calculators people have posted in the forums. I monitor my yoga and Pilates burns, and as I’d expect, the “easier” classes burn fewer than the tough ones. I’ve compared Apple Watch calculations to gym equipment and my stationery bike, and it runs 1/3 - 1/2 as many calories burned as shown on the equipment.

Calorie burns dropped proportionately with weight loss, as to be expected. So everything seems in order with what I’d expect my watch to report if it were accurate.

I have no idea what the “negative calorie burn” is or does, or why I’d want to set it up.

I prefer to K. I. S. S. and intuitive simplicity is what Apple is all about. Why make it more difficult for myself?

>>>Does your MFP app not have an extra details screen under the Apple Calorie Adjustment when you press and hold?<<<

I get this:




There’s no press and hold option above. It’s just a click thru to this, which tells me the same info as above.



I’ve changed to negative calories today, to see what it looks like.

Btw, the only way I could find to do that was via the website itself. There was no option on the iOS app that I could find. That may be a source of confusion, since people not using the website have no idea what it is

@springlering62 I honestly don't think that *YOU* need to be messing with your settings which *have been working for you ON AVERAGE*

On average your activity and logging seem to be balancing out for you and the information you get is enough for you. So why mess?

Do I think that the transfer of information as it is taking place is correct? No.

I think that you're:
a) missing the adjustment for actual non exercise activity.
b) your net calories for exercise may or may not be correct. Apple is probably giving you net calories above BMR, i.e. their net calories are the ones above an activity factor of 1.0. At best they would be doing net calories above a sedentary activity factor of 1.2 (most places, so probably including apple---mfp uses 1.25 for sedentary but that's an EXTRA issue that's not relevant here ). MFP for a "correct" interpretation of net calories, and given your setting of an activity factor of 1.8 (very active), MFP OUGHT to be considering only the calories above 1.8 * BMR in terms of true net exercise for the time periods in question (or 1.25xBMR; 1.4x, or 1.6x for the other MFP activity settings) So you're getting part of the credit you're missing from your "moves" daily activity calories by getting bonus credit on your named exercises... which cancels one error with another.

So in your particular case I don't know if it is worthwhile to be going down the rabbit hole, especially if ON AVERAGE things work out for you.

For other people who modulate their food intake more closely based on the caloric expenditure that they see in the app, AND who have a more varying level of activity which may not be primarily "named exercise" driven, having the transfer more "correct" may well be of benefit.

There doesn't exist a way of doing it directly from apple watch to MFP at this time. Your information is confirming or at the very least NOT disproving this. I mean while there is a remote chance that almost 14,000 steps is EXACTLY BRM 1.8 for you, chances are real good that, if the information were transferring over, there would have been at least a 1 calorie adjustment visible kn your screen shots as opposed to getting 0 every single time!

So. If it works for you... why mess with it?

If it doesn't work for you and you need to actually update your MFP TDEE (where MFP TDEE = all calories expended after daily activity and exercise and everything else has been considered). And where you are updating it with the information estimated by your watch which is estimating based on detection of metrics as opposed to a self selected menu item), if you want to update it with "correct" numbers, it ain't happening via the direct connection.

The workaround proposed by @heybales remains the only way I see it happening.

You need an app that understands apple and can collect non move, move, and exercise calories and sort them out into a single TDEE number. And you need that app to be able to shoot a single TDEE number to MFP. It would help if all apps use the Mifflin formula for base BMR calories.

@heybales put in the time and figured out that the pacer app would do it. beyond that... well, fitbit and garmin seem to work ok with mfp.

@heybales

so I have been using MFP with the negative calorie adjustment ever since this post.

I am completely confused what they are trying to do with it. Days I do similar sets of workouts, it’ll deduct vastly different amounts. A day I wasn’t feeling well and only got in one workout, it hardly deducted anything. I would have expected the opposite. One day I worked out heavily it deducted almost half the earned calories.

I’ve tried to keep an eye on it to see if there’s a pattern, but I’ll be darned if I can figure it out.

There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it.

springlering62 wrote: »

@heybales

so I have been using MFP with the negative calorie adjustment ever since this post.

I am completely confused what they are trying to do with it. Days I do similar sets of workouts, it’ll deduct vastly different amounts. A day I wasn’t feeling well and only got in one workout, it hardly deducted anything. I would have expected the opposite. One day I worked out heavily it deducted almost half the earned calories.

I’ve tried to keep an eye on it to see if there’s a pattern, but I’ll be darned if I can figure it out.

There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it.

I think that confirms my suspicion I mentioned - they didn't update that Stat's screen for the adjustment - you do indeed do NOT have accounts linked like folks with Fitbit and Garmin's do - where that account sends extra info.

This is MFP getting a step count, and because of the specific iOS app, getting the workouts sent over.

MFP attempts to use the steps to get a very rough extra calorie burn above whatever your activity level would provide anyway.

But since it doesn't know how many steps are part of the workout, to avoid potentially double-counting it takes away those workout calories it knows about.
But some steps really weren't part of it.

Anyway that's why nothing consistent.


The link account issue is pretty easy to see with the math.
There's a line that say what Apple is reporting as your daily burn so far with time stamp.
Apple reports only your base burn, almost equal to Sedentary on MFP. Which isn't true, it's missing move and exercise calories.

But since workouts are synced over, to avoid double counting it's removes them from the math.
So the figures are very easy to see - your workouts add up to what is removed from the daily burn.
The effect is the workouts don't actually increase your eating goal.
But it matches, so very easy to see what's happened with neg enabled.

So what's interesting is you've always had some calories subtracted, but with Negative adjustments disabled, it never went below 0 before. Now you are just getting to see the full extent of the subtractions.

I just sync my total Move calories at the end of each day. I don’t sync the exercises/workouts individually since I want the total Move calories synced, not just the formal workouts.

If you don’t start and stop an exercise, you’ll get little or no “credit” for it on Apple, and none at all on MFP.

If you’re exercising several times a day, as I do, that can put you in the area of undereating to fuel your body.

I record all exercises, but instead of eating exercise calories “back”, I try to stay at or near a flat calorie count, instead of relying on MFP and Apple to coordinate.

MFP currently tells me (before considering exercise calories earned) to eat 2000/ day based on height weight and activity level (“very active”). I shoot for 2200 , because I’m currently trying to drop a few pounds following several months of travel and very relaxed eating.

When I do lose them, I’ll reevaluate maintenance calories. I was maintaining at 32-3500 (60, female, 5’7”) early last year, pre-travel, at a slightly higher exercise level. I’m trying to force myself to sit and chill these days, but have FOMO after decades
of being couch-bound.

Anyway, all this is to say, don’t discount exercise calories even if you’re not recording them “properly”. I’ve found my Apple Watch to be within range of where I think it should be with what I’m recording.

Some people eat back half their exercise calories, others use a flat number like me.

I did turn on the Apple watch adjustment as suggested earlier by @heybales

That adjustment removes several hundred calories a day, but that’s because I don’t have “time” to be “highly active” in between all the exercises I record,so Apple adjusts for that. It took a long
time for me to understand that and get over feeling punished by the negative adjustment.


Apple seems to have a “learning curve”. I noticed that even the first two weeks of this year, when I returned to high activity levels than during travel months, it was a grind getting move rings to turn but now it seems to recognize I’m back in gear and they’re turning with regularity again.