My Fitness Pal settings / calorie allowance

[MiddleAgedDread]

Horrified by weight on Monday morning I've logged back into MFP and trying to work out my settings. I've put my current weight in and target weight. It seems to be giving me a basic calorie allowance of 1550 a day but then on Monday and Tuesday that increased to 2116 and 1790. I've synced my Garmin watch to it so I assume it's increasing the allowance based on me having recorded some exercise....but my Garmin says I burned more calories on Tuesday than on Monday so I don't understand why those values would be so different? 2116 seems too high, whereas 1790 would still leave me with around a 500 calorie deficit for the day.
Does anyone understand how this works please? It's quite hard to plan on a daily basis if my calorie allowance is going to change so much. I know there's a theory of not eating back calories you burn but when I'm back to full fitness I can burn 3000+ calories a day and there's no way I can do that on a diet of 1500!

It's amazing how much you can burn. My advice is to plan for your initial calorie allowance and if you are hungry later on and you have calories that you have burned then eat more.

does it add the "extras" as the day goes on or at the end of the day @ehb102 ? Today I've assumed it will give me more and already planned to use some of them ;) I feel like 1700-1800 is sustainable for me whereas 1550 really isn't!

If you have set up MFP to sync with your fitness tracker I think so.

Check that it isn’t counting your exercise twice. If it’s set up to sync with Health and with Garmin, for example, it can double count your exercise (mine was showing each run x2 in the app). You can scroll down in your daily diary to see the exercise to check, and just delete the duplicates by swiping left.

It's only showing my Garmin as connected @couch25kagain but I tracked two walks on it on Monday whereas on Tuesday I did a similar number of steps but tracked my gym session and didn't track the walks. So I bet that's why there's a difference in calorie allowance!

Not sure but mine updates my allowance shortly after a treadmill session

The only time my weight loss stalled was when my exercise was added to MFP and it gave me the extra calories back to eat.
ime it hugely overestimates cals burned!

I found MFP very inaccurate with their calorie count and several self entries that were way off. Nutricheck and Cronometer are more accurate.

Is it adding in extra calories for steps as well? I remember when I set mine up I set it to include calories on tracked exercise only as it initially added calories for steps as well and I found it made it more confusing and less accurate.

I'm not entirely sure @Roserunner I'll have to keep an eye on it. On Monday I tracked 2 walks and one Tuesday I tracked a short gym session but did untracked walks which took me to almost the same step count and calorie burn as Monday. But Monday's calorie allowance was 2116 and Tuesdays 1790. The later feels more right, I didn't do anything particularly strenuous!

@MiddleAgedDread can I ask how much exercise you are doing? My allowance starts at 1300 in the morning and tops up to 1500 as the day goes on... and I get well over 10,000 steps every day. I am just starving constantly and not really losing much at the moment

I’ve done around 16,500 steps the last couple
of days. Monday I tracked walks to over 6km in total, Tuesday I did the cross trainer and a few weights and then walked but didn’t track it. Will see what it does today!