Why MFP could be holding you back

For years, MyFitnessPal has been the nutrition and fitness tracker used and recommended at brolific rates among new to calorie tracking and fitness people looking to get their diet in order and achieve a weight related goal. As we’ve mentioned and you’ve more than likely read about, weight loss, weight gain, and body transformation is largely a product of our diet, so it only makes sense to know what’s going into our body on a daily basis. While some advocate “extreme” calorie counting and others shun the idea completely, I am somewhere in between. I find it extremely helpful for myself and my clients to see the foods they are consuming and an estimate of how much they are consuming. For many people, this means using some form of tracking app.

As tracking software goes, the vast majority are the same, especially at the free level. You can set your own goals, track your food, the quantity, add new foods, see the macronutrient and micronutrient breakdown, and add new foods not already listed in the database. MFP is not much better or worse than any other tracker out there as far as the tracking apps go other than some really poor entries of food done by people that either misenter or only enter what they care about. With the big time bankroll of Under Armour, it is pretty to look at and has a large number of features. Where MFP starts to fall apart is their recommendations for how much a person should be eating and their process.

The following picture is taken directly from MFP for me, a 5’11”, 210 lb, approximately 15% bodyfat individual that trains 6 hours per week. This is their recommendation for me to eat to maintain weight.

3,030 seems like a good number to eat in a day, but what is this second number, 2,770 calories per week? That is what MFP determines your fitness goal to be, approximately 692 calories per workout and an additional amount of calories you can eat IF you burn those calories. If you know anything about MFP, this very small line between Nutritional Goals and Fitness Goals is overlooked and misused - “So the more you exercise, the more you can eat!” Essentially a statement that they suggest “eating back” calories that you have burned off in order to reach your goal.

Now, let’s take the calculator on our ZStrength website, which uses five popular estimations, and then takes the average. Using the exact same numbers I entered into MFP, I receive the following result:

Looking at the output, the estimated average intake I need to maintain my weight would be 3,329 calories per day. Like the line below our calculator says, it is an estimate and could be off, resulting in needing some adjustment up or down...just like MFP could (and almost always does) need adjusting.

Now looking at some of the math:

MyFitnessPal	ZStrength Calc
7 days at 3030 = 21,210 calories per week Workout Calories = 2770 Total Calories per Week = 23,980 Average per Day = 3,426	Average per Day = 3,329

That’s right, assuming you actually burn those 2,770 calories per week, you could eat an average 3,426 calories per day and the numbers aren’t that different. But is this clear to the average person just starting? Probably not and that’s what creates the problem.

The problem, and it’s a BIG PROBLEM that has happened time and again with clients when they use MFP, they either don’t know that MFP sets them low and wants them to eat back their calories or they know it and over-eat their exercise calories. The result is chronic over or under-eating because they are following the suggestions of MFP.

Combine the flaws of MFP with even the best non-clinical calorie burn estimators have a margin of error of at least 10%, and you can begin to understand just how bad this could turn out. Assuming one of the closest estimations of 10% and 692 calories burned per day could be 761 or 622. PN did a piece about how bad calorie estimators are: [http://www.precisionnutrition.com/problem-with-calorie-counting-calories-out].

As someone that works with clients to help them build the body they want, I have problems with the lack of clarity and relying on measurements with a known margin of error. MFP is going to take an inexact science (estimating calories in food) combined with another inexact science (how many calories you burn) and add an even less exact science (how many calories you burn in exercise) and convince you to eat that amount. Further, MFP only includes CARDIO calories in what you should eat back, so if you weight train for an hour and “burn 500” calories, you are still to eat 2730 according to them, but if you do an hour of cardio and “burn 300”, you get to eat 3030.

And a simple scenario to hammer home the problem:

You are training to lose weight at a rate of 1 lb / week. MFP gives you a 500 calorie deficit and a count of 2,530 + 1,500 calories of exercise per week. At 5 days per week of exercise, that’s 300 extra calories. Training day total: 2,830.  Off-day total: 2,530.

You train and log your workouts on MFP, which only logs your cardio burn. You train an hour with weights, burning approximately 550 calories + 30 minutes of cardio burning 150 calories.

In addition to being at a 500 calorie deficit to start, you are now an extra 550 calories short because MFP doesn’t know what you burned lifting weight. That’s over a 1,000 calorie deficit and 25% below your maintenance calories. It goes without saying that that large of a deficit isn’t good for you, especially in the long term.

Is MFP really that bad? No. Can this scenario be avoided? Yes, if you are knowledgeable (which most people just starting out aren’t) or if you know how to work MFP like a pro (which most people don’t). And an even easier yes; don’t rely on MFP to determine how many calories you should eat. There are hundreds of calculators and formulas to help you estimate your needs, which can then be plugged in to MFP. As mentioned before, we have one that on our site that uses 5 of the most popular formulas and provides an average. You can find it here at: http://zstrengthfit.com/tools/calculator.html