What about using Apple Watch "Move" calories?

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.