[Garmin] Fix inaccurate 'calories remaining' calculation

I've been using MyFitnessPal for 15 years and subscribed to the premium plan for the last 3. I have a 900 day streak and I haven't missed logging a single calorie in that time. I know, I have a problem and I don't recommend this lifestyle for anyone, but it does give me a unique perspective from which to review Garmin Connect +'s new Nutrition logging feature. I was initially excited to try out this new feature because as an FR970 owner, I'm already using Garmin Connect every day and this could be an opportunity to eliminate one more app from my life, not to mention the $10/yr savings for GC+ vs MFP premium. So I signed up for the 30 day free trial to give this new feature a proper side by side test and see if it would be worth it for me to switch. If you're not interested in the detailed comparison, pros and cons, and just want the tl;dr conclusion; here it is: ***I was very close to making the switch, but ultimately will stick with MFP until Garmin makes additional improvements***. Now for the weirdos like me, on to the nitty gritty. For the first 15 days of the trial, I logged everything individually in both Garmin and MFP so I could get a good direct comparison of certain foods. After that, it was getting too time consuming, so I'd only log in Garmin and then do a "quick add" of macros at the end of the day into MFP using the daily total from Garmin. Let's start with the PROS, or the things that Garmin does better than MFP **1. Image Recognition**: By far, the coolest feature, is one that DC Rainmaker suggested in his video, where you could do an image capture of a food while it was sitting on a gram scale showing the weight and the app would not only identify the food, but automatically grab the weight from the scale. Unfortunately at the time, this did not work for him, nor did it work for me early in my testing. HOWEVER! It seems at some point Garmin quietly added this feature and I can confirm that it has definitely worked for me when weighing a banana, or blueberries the last few days. This is especially useful since both Garmin and MFP are pretty decent at identifying ingredients in food, but pretty rubbish at estimating the quantity or weight. Overall, Garmin's ingredient detection seems slightly better. That, combined with the scale feature gives a clear win here to Garmin **2. Food Database**: While MFP's food database is likely larger overall from having such a long history of additions to draw from, Garmin's is ultimately better and more useful for a couple reasons. First, every item I've looked up so far, includes at least one portion or volume measurement, along with a 100g measurement. The 100g option is incredibly useful for being accurate with your logging quantity. On MFP, you might have to try 3-4 different versions of a listing before finding one that has nutrition by weight instead of just volume or servings. Second, the barcode scanning is both incredibly fast and much more accurate than MFP. 3/10 times on MFP a barcode scan will bring up a completely unrelated food. It seems their UPC codes are simply out of date, or perhaps they're mixing global regions which Garmin isn't doing since it has you specify your region upon setup. Another solid win for Garmin. **3. Convenience / UX / App and Web Interface:** As I mentioned before, my main reason for wanting to try this, is that it would be nice if I could eliminate an app and consolidate my nutrition tracking into my (actual) fitness app (Side note, activity logging in MFP is horrendous). It is very nice to have everything in one place. Also, the nutrition plan setup, including adjusting your goals based on tracked calorie burn has potential (But ultimately does not work right now and I'll expand on this in the cons section). The UI/UX is nice enough, certainly better than MFP and it's very nice to be able to do everything on the app and the web with a similar experience. MFP has updated their app while their website remains in the past which makes for a disjointed experience where nothing is quite the same. Garmin takes the win here as well. Unfortunately this is where things take a turn and we must give MFP it's due. Here are the Garmin CONS, or at least the things that MFP does better. **1. Calories remaining:** As terrible as activity logging is in MFP, at least I was able to sync my Garmin activities back to MFP automatically and since my baseline TDEE was manually set correctly, MFP was able to give me a reasonably accurate assessment of whether I was in a deficit or surplus. I'm sure this is a bug that is being addressed, but Garmin can't seem to figure this out. I've set up my nutrition plan several times and for some reason it can never give me the accurate "calories remaining" calculation. The "calories burned" tab in connect is never accurately reflected on the nutrition page and it always tells me I have more to go. I'm sure this will be fixed, but for now, it makes the nutrition plan setup useless, and actually counter productive for people who are trusting it and not paying attention. **2. Search:** When typing a food in search, MFP will auto-fill with recent or frequent foods that you've logged, making it easy to find and select something that you've likely logged before. Garmin shows you a generic autocomplete suggestion list instead, full of things that you've never logged. Granted, if you actually hit search, the results will favor your "favorites" but if you have not favorited the item, but it's something you've logged every day of the last week, you will still need to fill out more search criteria or scroll down the list to find it. **3. Fiber and Micronutrients**: I know most people are probably only tracking calories and it's a small subset of folks actually tracking macros, and an even smaller subset of those tracking micros. But MFP allows me to make sure I'm hitting my vitamin and fiber goals and Garmin simply does not. **4. Macronutrient calorie calculation:** Both MFP and Garmin allow you to enter the macros when you do a quick add for a food or meal. However, MFP is intelligent enough to calculate the calories based on the grams of carbs, fats and proteins. Garmin will let you add these measurements in, but it will still require you to enter a calorie count and that number can have no relation to the macros. Want to log a donut that has 2g of protein, 23 carbs, 10g of fat and only 9 calories? Go right ahead! **5. Meal / Recipe creation:** Garmin's idea of meal creation is just a grouped list of foods or ingredients that you have at one time. A feature on MFP that I use often is the recipe creator. This is especially useful for a few reasons. First, you can often import ingredients automatically from a web based recipe via URL, or you can paste multiple ingredients into a form either from a text document or copied from a photo. Granted, this normally results in some hilarious interpretations of quantities that need to be fixed like: "1 Onion" becomes "1KG of Onion", or "Fresh Ground Pepper" becomes "1 Cup of Pepper". But, it's still very useful because I can not only input all the ingredients, but also say how many servings the recipe makes and then it I'll log the appropriate amount. If I want to do this in Garmin, I have to divide all of the ingredient quantities ahead of time, and let's say I started a dish thinking it would be 6 servings, but really looks like it should be 4, I've got to change each of those entries individually. MFP simply makes this much easier. Finally, here are a couple things which give MFP the edge, but you can't really fault Garmin for. **1. Auto weight logging:** I have a Withings Plus smart scale which is connected to MFP. MFP's weight and calorie intake were previously connected to Garmin, which allowed me to log my weight in Garmin every day by simply standing on the scale. Of course I had to break that connection and since Garmin sells their own smart scale, it's unlikely that they'll support Withings integration and I'm unlikely to buy said Garmin scale, so annoyingly, I would need to do this manually from now on. **2. Historical Data:** Years of recipes I've created, custom foods I've logged. Decades of weight, body measurements, and other entries logged. As a huge data nerd it's nice to have all of that. I do export CSV files every now and then so I can keep track of it separately but it sure would be nice if Garmin allowed us to import historical data and recipes created in other apps. If Garmin adds in a real recipe builder and fiber/micro tracking, I will probably switch but ultimately, I've decided to cancel Garmin Connect + after my free trial and stick with MFP for another year. I just hope I can reconnect MFP daily calories and weight logging after I do. Thank you for coming to my TED talk and if you made it to the end of this ridiculously long post, please leave a comment 🤣