Short answer: no. Gravl Macros never reads the active energy or calories burned figure from Apple Health or Health Connect. This is not a setting you have switched off — the app does not ask for that data at all, on either platform.
What the app does read
Three things, each only with your permission:
| From your health app | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Weight | Your weigh-ins, so the trend weight keeps working whether you weigh in here or on a connected scale |
| Body fat percentage | The energy content of a kilo gained or lost, which differs between a lean body and a less lean one |
| Average daily step count | A single read, during setup |
Steps are the only activity signal, and they are used once. At setup they scale your starting activity from a real figure instead of a label you picked from a list: around 2,500 steps a day sets the bottom of the range and it climbs from there, capped at the top. After setup, steps never touch the estimate again. Your expenditure vs. TDEE calculators covers what that starting number is worth.
Why the burn figure stays out
Because it is not a measurement of you. A watch estimates your burn from heart rate, movement, and a population model of someone your size — the same species of formula a TDEE calculator uses, just running all day. Feeding it in would mean replacing a measurement with an estimate.
Your expenditure in Gravl comes from arithmetic that needs no model of your body at all: what you ate, and what your weight did in response. How your expenditure is calculated walks through it.
Your training is already in the number
Every calorie you burn training is counted — not as an entry you add, but through its effect. Train more and one of two things happens, and the equation reads both:
- Your weight trend starts falling. The estimate rises to explain where the energy went.
- You eat more to match and your weight holds. A higher intake against a flat trend is a higher expenditure. The number rises without the scale moving at all.
Either way it shows up over two to three weeks, because the algorithm works in three-week windows. It also means there is no "add exercise calories" screen anywhere in the app: that run is already in your expenditure, and adding it a second time would count it twice.