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"Calories Remaining" report is calculated incorrectly - or not displaying at all

LPIttenger
over 8 years ago
According to the GC help page, "calories remaining" is supposed to pull your target calories from MFP, then use that - along with 'active calories' - to calculate whether you're under or over that benchmark.

>> Calories Remaining – When you have determined a MyFitnessPal calorie goal, we’ll help you track how many daily calories you are above or below your goal. The formula is calorie goal minus net calories.

from: https://connect.garmin.com/en-US/help/how-to/

That's sure not what I'm getting.


For example, for March 13th:
* goal = 1390
* consumed = 1639 (or 1638, as GC reports, 1 off from what MFP has)
* active = 301 (unlike the 267 that MFP reports)

Means the correct value is (1390+301)-1639 = 52

And when I go to "Daily Summary" for that day, that' what I get. (Well, 53, since there's that mysterious 1 calorie difference from MFP's value).


But when I bring up the "Calories Remaining" report, I get a value of 729 on that graph for that day.

?!!


Every other day's value is equally inaccurate. I have no idea what that Report is reporting - but it certainly isn't calories remaining. It's not even showing the value that GC calculates (on Daily Summary).



Second problem - when I click "four weeks" (or longer) on that report, I'm told "You have no data for this time period."

I /do/ have data for it, and I can see it if I go back week by week.

So that's messed up too.




Is this just me, or are others finding that the "Calories Remaining" report is completely wrong?

The recent troubles with coordinating with MFP may have gotten cleared up today, as I read in another thread, but that hasn't fixed the "Calories Remaining" report at all.
  • 0 over 8 years ago
    You are correct

    Same here -- looks like Garmin calories burned aren't syncing to My Fitness Pal.
  • 0 over 8 years ago
    I don't think it's a sync problem.

    Garmin is getting the calories correctly from MFP now. And it's computing "remaining calories" correctly in the "Calories In/Out" widget.

    So it's able to get the numbers correctly, and do the computation correctly.


    But the "Calories Remaining" widget/graph (one of the 'report' options) is completely screwed up - and reporting values I can make no rhyme nor reason of.


    For instance, today I'm at -46 calories remaining ... the "Calories Remaining" widget reports I have 442 left.
    Yesterday I was at 329 remaining (goal minus [consumed minus active]) and the "Calories Remaining" widget reports I had 1005 left.

    So not only is it consistently wildly inaccurate, it's not even inaccurate by the same amount. (A difference of 375 between the two days for real, and a difference of 563 reported by the defective report.)


    In other words, the "Calories Remaining" report is completely useless... makes me wonder about the reliability of the other reports now.
  • 0 over 8 years ago
    Active calories don't add up

    I'm not seeing an error with MFP. What I am seeing is that the active calories in the Active Calories and Calories widgets are frequently allot less than the total calories burned from recorded activities. (example widgets giving me 600 active calories on a day with two activities, run 900+, walk 200+ and 10000+ general steps)

    I turned of negative adjustments for MFP as I was getting some crazy values. Example -1000 when set up as sedentary on a day when I'd run for 3 hours and walked 1.5 hours, here even if they were doing some kind of BMR adjustment the widget numbers would be wrong.

    I've given up relying on the garmin app for calorie tracking as it's just silly and garmin can't say what is going on. This inconstancy seems to have appeared in the last month or so. Before that all worked well.

    To me the issue seems to be with Garmin's active calorie totals. Does this ring true with anyone else?
  • 0 over 8 years ago
    Garmin and MFP use different base BMR calculations so this could be the cause of the adjustment issues you're seeing.

    Find your BMR using the St Jeor formula. http://www.myfitnesspal.com/tools/bmr-calculator

    Then multiply by 1.25...that should give you your MFP value at SEDENTARY & Maintain current weight setting as MFP uses 1.25 for sedentary.

    However multiply that same BMR value by 1.2. It will likely add up to your daily "resting calories" on Connect.

    Thus throwing in a negative adjustment until you use enough steps to level it out.

    Personally i put in a false height/age in connect to compensate for this so they are essentially equal. But not sure if that throws off anything else like steps etc but hasn't been a concern for me.
  • 0 over 8 years ago
    Yeah, I know there's a different way of calculating things... but I'm fairly certain that's not what's going wrong here.


    If Garmin were simply using a different base value, it would always be off from MFP's number by a consistent amount -- whatever the difference in between the "resting calories" calculations is.

    As you can see from the example I gave above, it isn't.


    But beyond that, Garmin is not consistent with /itself/.

    In the "Calories In/Out" widget, Garmin correctly computes "calories remaining."

    In the "Calories Remaining" report - which ought to be a graph of those same values -- it gives /completely/ different numbers.


    So I'm pretty sure what's going on is that, at the moment, the "Calories Remaining" report & graph is seriously bugged and functionally useless.


    Which is why it'd be nice to see it fixed.
  • 0 over 8 years ago
    err....

    Hm, I really should double-check before I type.


    Last week, the "Calories Remaining" was all over the place, no pattern to it. (As in the example I gave)

    But that was perhaps a function of the ongoing failures to sync properly with MFP .. which are, for the moment, resolved.

    I just went and looked over the last 4-5 days and found that the "Calories Remaining" value in the report is, at least for those days, off by a consistent amount from the "calories remaining" value given in the "Calories In/Out" widget.

    So perhaps it is a case just of the resting value difference (or some such) and was simply badly bugged when all MFP syncing was broken.



    Even so, it is - at best - very confusing that "Calories Remaining" gives one value in the widget (a value matching what the GC documentation says to expect) and a /different/ value in the "Calories Remaining" report.
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    Crissyrose74
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    #1 [h=2] Calorie burn wildly inaccurate?[/h] 03-27-2017, 11:52 AM
    Has anyone had major accuracy issues with Garmin devices? I'm a 5'3 female sitting at 133 lbs with a sedentary office job, and I work out 3-5 times per week (a mix of lifting and running). My new Garmin Forerunner 35 (which has HR) is telling me that I consistently burn 3000+ calories on my active days which is wildly inaccurate.

    I made sure my height, weight and gender are accurate and my activity level is currently set to 3. I spoke with a rep and he told me to up my activity level, as the device assumes someone at a higher activity level is more efficient and therefore burns fewer calories during a given activity vs. someone who is sedentary. But while that technically makes sense, it's still odd to me because other devices manage a fairly accurate calorie estimation with only the heart rate monitor, steps, and your height, weight, age, etc.

    I want to run a half in November so I decided to get my first-ever running watch now that my Fitbit crapped out on me. I didn't need one with a lot of frills and I wanted to get one on a budget, so at $160 I decided on this one. The in-watch GPS was an important factor in my decision because I keep reading here that phone GPS is inaccurate.

    I've only had the device for a few days, so maybe it takes some time to adjust for accuracy, but I'm wondering if there's anything else I can do to make it more accurate. If this is just a bug with Garmin watches, I may just get a Fitbit Blaze and deal with the slight GPS inaccuracy since it uses phone GPS.
    Tags: calorie burn, calories, forerunner 35, tracking

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      Carmen_F
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      #2
      03-27-2017, 03:11 PM
      Mine is most time way off, too. I don't know why. I had Fitbit before with less calories burned. Nobody can tell me that I (female, 39 years, 1,67m, 51kg) burn more than 2300 calories with working 2 hours and going 4700 steps the whole day, but no sports.

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        Angela4332
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        #3
        Today, 09:16 AM
        I just bought a Garmin Forerunner 35. So I took 1000 steps and it says I earned 209 calories. That seems very high. I usually get around 13000 steps a day. So at the end of the day it says I have over 1400 calories left to consume. Can anyone please tell me how to insure that I am getting accurate info from this device? I used to have Fitbit Blaze (it quit working after almost 2 years) and it seemed on target and I never worried about over consuming. I have my calorie goal set at 1330, I weigh 146, 5' 3"and am very active. Any help would be appreciated. I have had the device for 3 days and am already frustrated. I depend on calorie counting as I lost 68 pounds so far when using the fitbit. I have also turned on negative adjustments in MFP. I thought I would give the Garmin a try after reading reviews. Thanks guys!
      • 0 over 7 years ago
        Yeah it's been like this for a long time unfortunately
      • 0 over 7 years ago
        I just bought a Garmin Forerunner 35. So I took 1000 steps and it says I earned 209 calories


        If you look at Daily Summary, Activities, in Connect you will see a line for steps. If you put the cursor over the ?
        It shows that the calories for "Steps" is not just from steps, but all activities except those that are timed.

        The total calories include those for activities plus BMR.
      • 0 over 5 years ago
        I've found that calories burned eacy day (steps-widget) - calories consumed (calories in/out-widhet) = calories remaining in the report. Unforntunately sometimes the sync has failed for some days and the only option is to click on "Sync now" in calories in/out"-wighet for previous days and then reloading gramin connect page for the report to get updated.

        So basically there is two calories remaing:

        1) myfitnesspal calores remaing - calories in/out-wiget
        2) garmin calories remaining - calories remaing -report <- I find this the most interesing as it is tied to the actual burned calories reported by the device

        Calories burned should be easily accesible both in gc web and gc mobile. As it is now the calories burned is "hidden" inside the steps-wiget.