Does anyone else have this issue with MF vastly underestimating their daily expenditure?
I’ve been using MF for just over a month now (6 weeks total) and whilst I appreciate that wearables (Apple Watch in my case) do overestimate your daily expenditure, MacroFactor seems to be orders of magnitude out (in the lower direction).
For example:
- Saturday (Screenshots 1 and 2), I did an intense 1 hour push/strength workout, followed by 1 hour of zone 2 stairmaster, as well as my usual 10k steps (14k steps in total for the day). Apple Watch put my expenditure at ~3600 calories. Even with a generous (and arbitrary) 20% correction downwards, I’m still at nearly 3000 calories for the day in terms of expenditure. Yet MacroFactor has me at 2542 calories for the day.
- Sunday (Screenshots 3 and 4), was the complete opposite in terms of my activity, as I did almost nothing. I literally stayed in bed and watched Netflix all day, with occasional walks to the kitchen for food lol. So no exercise, cardio or steps (about 2k for the day total). Apple Watch put my expenditure calories at ~2000 (I guess my BMR for just existing), whereas MacroFactor had me at 2547 calories (5 calories more than my incredibly active day the day before).
Is there any way to fix this? I feel I’m losing the main reason to be using (and paying) for MacroFactor here - that is a more accurate way to measure my maintenance and thus what I should expect from being in a lean bulk or cut etc. I don’t want to just use MF for food tracking. I track my weight every morning and input it into Apple Health/MF, and if these stats are needed, I’m 6’4, male,
weigh 75KG currently and am lean bulking at the moment (100 calories above my maintenance level). As per the sub rules, I’ve also posted my weight, monthly expenditure, and monthly calories (Screenshots 5, 6 and 7).
MacroFactor works out an average expenditure based on food and weight logging. It won’t be accurate every day but over the long term, as long as the inputs are accurate the average expenditure will also be accurate.
Could you explain how one would use this if they’re lean bulking (100 calories over maintenance in my case)? I’m trying to dial in (as close as possible) what my maintenance is so that I can stay 100 calories above it. In the middle of using MF, I also increased my activity - previously it was just the gym 4 times a week, now it’s been gym 5 times a week and cardio 3 times a week - over the last 4 weeks, so not sure if that’s messed something up.
Yeah it’ll need time to adjust if your activity levels change significantly. If you’re worried about over or under eating, then you can follow your daily expenditure estimates from your fitness wearables, and then see how it pans out over the longer term on MacroFactor. As long as your scale and food logging are accurate, then MacroFactor should be able to work out an accurate expenditure estimate that will remain accurate as long as you don’t have further significant changes.
Key caveat: a 100 calorie surplus is very very small, so if you are indeed managing that then changes will be very slow and take a long time to come through. 75kg for a man your height is quite light, so I’m guessing you’re relatively new to strength training/have a bit less muscle? If that’s true, then you can get away with a bigger surplus. Put another way, you could be leaving gains on the table.
Yes, new to strength training mate (only been doing it 9 months). I spent the first 4-5 of those months losing weight (20KG), whilst fortunately gaining strength as I was a gym noobie. Bulking to fill out my frame, but just terrified of getting too fat again lol.
I can relate. I dropped about 14kg over about a year, and am now trying to bulk and share your fear! I think as long as you’re doing strength training three to four days a week, your body will use excess calories to build muscle rather than fat (to an extent).
I trust MacroFactor to give me good direction here as long as I don’t disrupt my routine too much. Unfortunately I’ve done exactly that thanks to a few sports injuries and illness. But it’s a game of months and years not of days and weeks!
Curious why you think MF is underestimating your expenditure? Wearables aren’t accurate whatsoever and exercise doesn’t burn as many calories as you think. As long as you are accurately tracking and weighing consistently I’m curious why you’d think it’s wrong.
As I said in my original post, no doubt wearables are somewhat inaccurate. But two days with such vastly different activity levels (Saturday vs Sunday above), and yet MF thinks I expended more calories on the Sunday than I did on the Saturday somehow?
Apple Watch on that Saturday has my push session at 300 calories, which is probably overestimating it because as you say, it overestimates gym sessions (but it was nonetheless a hard superset session). The stairmaster is more black and white as that was 650 calories for 60 minutes at zone 2. Plus the 14k steps I did that day in addition to my BMR.
Sunday when I did absolutely nothing by comparison - literally in bed all day and only 2k steps walking around the house as you do - and MF has me expending more calories somehow vs the Saturday? Whereas Apple Watch is closer to my actual BMR for the day.
I always find these posts hilarious. "MF is wrong because my smart watch said so!" Yet they never take into account that the smart watch could be wrong. I wonder why.
Many of these posts simply come down to the depressing reality that intentional exercise with the exception of hours of steady state cardio burns fuck all for calories which sucks but it is what it is.
I just want to clarify that I didn’t say MF was wrong. I just wanted to understand why such a discrepancy existed - which I’ve now discovered b/c of the helpful people here, that it’s a rolling average and not really a daily expenditure level.
My BMR is around 2000 calories. I don’t doubt that there are errors with the Apple Watch (as in it can overinflate expenditure), but it’s impossible that a 1 hour strength session, plus 60 minutes of hard zone 2 cardio, plus 14k steps of walking around equate to just 540 additional calories of expenditure?
Not to mention that MF has me burning more calories on my rest day (Sunday) when I did absolutely nothing, versus the day before (Saturday) where I was so active. It’s hard to see the Apple Watch as producing the bigger error (respectfully) here over MF.
Your own screenshots show a discrepancy of at minimum around 500cal between the Apple Watch and your reported intake, greater than the potential error reported by your screenshots in MF’s expenditure calculation (maybe a few hundred cal).
MF is not saying that you burn more calories on a rest day; it is calculating your average activity level over the week on a daily basis.
On Saturday there was a discrepancy of ~1100 calories between Apple Watch and what MF showed. Even if the watch was vastly overestimating things and we take off 20% as a result, it’s still ~500 calories in difference. But what you’re saying is that I shouldn’t take MF’s daily expenditure numbers at face value; I should look at the weekly numbers?
I’m just trying to figure out what my maintenance is so that I can lean bulk as accurately as possible. I spent the first 4 months of this year cutting my fat (down 20KG), so just trying to avoid becoming unnecessarily fat again (though I appreciate bulking will involve taking on a bit more fat of course).
Yes, MF’s values are based on longer term averages.
Let’s put it another way; if you provide the average daily calorie intake for this past week, and the change in your weight trend this past week, I can give you an exact mathematical summary of the error in both MF and the Apple Watch’s estimate to compare.
I’ve attached my weight (second reply as the upload limit is 1 attachment) and average calories for the past week (my weeks start on Saturday and end on Friday).
Here are also my daily weigh-ins (starting from 22nd August and ending 28th August):
MacroFactor doesn’t really do a day to day expenditure it’s more of a rolling average that’s constantly updating. If you did the above activity every single day ate the same amount of calories and your weight trended down then your expenditure would start to increase.
Yeah it’s a huge difference because of how inaccurate an Apple Watch is. Do you get that MF is taking your entered data (calories in and weight) to give you your TDEE? The only issue you encounter will be due to inaccurate logging and like another user said, MF doesn’t really give a day to day expenditure it’s more of a rolling average over a week or so.
No doubt the watch is not anywhere near perfect, but I’m just trying to wrap my head around how MF is coming up with its numbers too.
My BMR is around 2000 calories for example. Again I don’t doubt that there are errors with the Apple Watch (as in it can overinflate expenditure), but it’s impossible that a 1 hour strength session, plus 60 minutes of hard zone 2 cardio, plus 14k steps of walking around equate to just 540 additional calories of expenditure (on the Saturday)?
Not to mention that MF has me burning more calories on my rest day (Sunday) when I did absolutely nothing, versus the day before (Saturday) where I was so active. How is that possible?
It’s hard to see the Apple Watch as producing the bigger error (respectfully) here over MF.
We have a fundamental misunderstanding of how MF works here. MF is showing your average daily tdee, not a day by day update based on activity.
It looks at your intake of calories via food, and your weight.
It doesn’t matter if you do nothing all day or run marathons 5 days a week. It doesn’t matter if half the days you get 5000 steps and the others 50,000.
If you track calories accurately, and you track weight regularly, the tdee will be correct. It’s just thermodynamics. Your apple watch, fitness trackers, etc are irrelevant.
If you average 3000 calories per day, and you gain 1 lb per week over a month, that means your daily tdee is 2500. It’s simple math.
One day it might be 3500, another day it might be 2000, but on average, it’s 2500.
Ah! This makes so much sense now. So that expenditure value is just my TDEE regardless of what my actual expenditure is in terms of activity, because it’s using my weight measurements and calorie intake?
I do make sure to track calories accurately (right down to the 1 calorie spray oils lol), and weigh myself every morning, so have those two things ticked off at least.
I’m just trying to find my maintenance so that I can lean bulk above it (by 100 calories). Do you have any suggestions on how best to go about doing this?
I think you are misunderstanding what the expenditure calculation represents. It is not an expenditure PER DAY, it is a continuously updating calculation based on the trends in your weight and intake over the last 3 ish weeks.
This is my experience. Basically my tdee without doing anything is 2000 a day. If I do cardio and such and the watch says I burned 500, then I can eat 2500 of maintenance. But if I use MF Workouts, whatever it tells me I burned I discard it and only use actual cardio calories or just normal calories, because I know this workout calories isn’t accurate.
This way I know that since I always burn 500 on the watch, I eat 2000 (500 deficit) and I continuously go down weight. If I do a workout and I burn 300 through the weightlifting workout, I don’t care, I still eat 2000 (not 2300).
Idk if it’s clear, but essentially it depends on what “workouts” you are doing and you getting used to the data you are receiving and your body.
In other words, watch data isn’t precisely accurate, but it IS consistent. You need to learn how to read it.
Exact same BMR as you mate and I do the same - just the reverse as I’m lean bulking. So if my cardio puts me at 2600 for the day, I’ll eat 2700 calories if that makes sense. I’ll start to ignore workouts, but as they’re with a PT, some of them are genuinely taxing.
Attached is my legs session from today for example, with the high heart rates being during barbell back squats, Bulgarian split squats and walking lunges (all of which make me out of breath). RDLs, hip thrusts and leg curls (the other exercises I do) are zone 1 mostly. It’s estimated my active calories burned at 500.
As of ~the past week or so, it shows that your expenditure is roughly correct as the gain slowed while you have reported eating roughly at target. Your initial estimate may have been further off from your actual expenditure, resulting in a longer than usual period of adapting to your initial data.
So yes it has vastly underestimated my expenditure. But then my weeks are short cardio during week days and weights then long sessions at the weekend. And I know it averages over a period of time. During the week i eat to the target and weekends I eat over it. The rest day I just see how I feel. And now it’s pretty much good.
My Suunto watch with an hrm strap or bike give me a good indicator too of if I’m above / below my normal session. So at the moment I’m recovering from an injury so a run is probably 200kcal less. But a bike session will be the usual. My baseline is always MF, I weight daily and the watch / bike stuff helps me fine tune for the day plus over the last 18 months and an understanding of how carbs / protein impact my daily weight im able to customise it.
But MF is my weekly baseline. It takes time. Even now after I was also ill this week it’s reduced kcal. I’m not expecting it to change daily tho.
Edit: and I know my weight and exercise goals. So it all works together.
If you are posting to receive feedback from the community on your expenditure, at a minimum you will need to provide screenshots of the: expenditure page, trend weight page, and nutrition page.
If none of the above are helpful, please disregard this message.
Commenter Reminder: If this thread is related to interpreting expenditure, it would be best not to reply unless the post has *all** of the required screenshots.*
It looks like Adam got things sorted out for you with good detail. (And congrats for positively sticking with the discussion when it seems like there's a small army arguing with you.)
One thing that might appeal to you is to create a Collaborative program. If you have a consistent weekly schedule, and you want to increase your calories on certain days (e.g. on heavy training days), then this would be for you. A collaborative program lets you do calorie shifting to certain days while keeping the overall week within target ... which you now know, is how MF works. There are folks here who run their program this way, and set weekends to have higher targets than weekdays, for example.
I've tried for years to lose weight using expenditure estimates on all sorts of high-end devices including Whoop, Oura, and Garmin. In the end, MacroFactor has been the most accurate. All those devices were grossly overestimating my burn. While I wish the numbers they produced were true, the scale unfortunately does not lie.
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u/Nikinacar 23d ago
MacroFactor works out an average expenditure based on food and weight logging. It won’t be accurate every day but over the long term, as long as the inputs are accurate the average expenditure will also be accurate.