Apple Watch and MyFitnessPal not talking to one another

Question

For a long time I’ve been using MyFitnessPal on my iPhone as a diet/calorie tracker. I recently bought an Apple Watch Series 3 to track my exercise, steps and so on, and I’m trying to get it to work properly with MyFitnessPal, but something has gone astray.

In MyFitnessPal I’ve chosen my Apple Watch as the device to track steps. And, in the Health app I’ve given permission for MyFitnessPal to read Apple Watch data for Steps, Walking + Running Distance, and Workouts.

The problem is, whenever I look at my Diary in MyFitnessPal it never seems to capture the exercise I’m doing, and this is throwing out all my Calories remaining for the day. It does show an indication of my steps, but I’m not being allocated any calories for this or other exercise.

I called Apple Support and they checked all my settings for the Health app and Apple Watch and everything is good. I contacted MyFitnessPal and as far as they can tell, I’ve set everything right within their app as well.

So why isn’t this working? Has anyone else come across this? Is there a fix? I’m desperate to get this working!

Thanks in advance for any and all help! :)

Answer 1

This may sound silly, but since everything is okay according to Apple and MyFitnessPal, are you actually doing any exercise? Let me explain…

If you’re not telling the Apple Watch that something you’re doing is to be counted as exercise, then the data is probably not being recorded in the way MyFitnessPal wants in order to see it as exercise.

So, to solve this, try using the Workout app on your Apple Watch the next time you’re doing exercise (even if it’s just a walk) and see if that is recognised as exercise in MyFitnessPal. If so, you should then get credited the calories for the exercise you’ve done.

As for the normal everyday steps you’re doing from walking around etc, while MyFitnessPal is showing you an indication of these, it’s probably not going to count any calories associated with these steps as it's already factored that into its calculations for how many calories you should be doing on each day.

What I mean by this is that when you set MyFitnessPal up you would have entered your Activity Level from one of four choices: Not Very Active; Lightly Active; Active; and Very Active. So the app has already factored that into its calculations. On the other hand, when you actually do some exercise, this will be seen as over and above what it’s already calculated.

In a nutshell, using the Workout app on your Apple Watch should track the data that MyFitnessPal will except as ‘exercise’.