Calorie dump just before midnight using Pixel Watch

[MBJ006]

Hi, please help.

I'm 187cm and 102kg. The calories burned total is always WAY off (too high). I know it includes bmr and exercise.

I started wearing my Samsung watch at the same time as my pixel as an experiment (Samsung health vs Fitbit). To get calories even close to Samsung health (or online calculators) I had to massively reduce me height on Fitbit to 70cm as a solution!

That seemed to work great and at 1130 pm they were similar. Then for some reason the Fitbit suddenly adds on 500 calories or so to the my daily total at midnight?!?! Is this because I have put in a height below the minimum and it suddenly corrects?

I love my pixel watch but Fitbit is driving me nuts. I have tried reset etc and checked all my entered info. Why do an extra 500 calories suddenly appear on my burned total at midnight? I checked the calories graph breakdown and it doesn't show a sudden increase on the graph at midnight.

Thanks!

Moderator Edit: Clarified subject

[JohnnyRow]

So if I understand correctly you are starting off with the assumption that Samsung is correct.  So in order to make Fitbit results match Samsung, you are telling Fitbit that you are 2 ft 4 in tall and 220 pounds (sorry have to think American units to picture it).

Right at the beginning, I'm going to question your devotion to Samsung's accuracy and willingness to bend other data to match it.

But for the 500 calories,  appearing "at midnight" won't do. Is it before midnight or after midnight? i.e. which day is it on?  You can see calories burned per 15 minutes.  Unless you are in the middle of a workout at midnight, you should be able to distinguish a 500 calorie difference.  And calories burned are a function of heart rate.  Look at heart rate graph also.

[MBJ006]

Hi, thanks for reply. I see your point re: Samsung but Fitbit had me
burning 5000 calories at some points with little activity and suggesting I
had 4500 calories to eat to make a deficit! Online calculators for bmr and
exercise were close to Samsung. People keep raising this issue.

With regards to graphs for calories and heart rate I can't see any
anomalies and I'm not doing late night activities. I can't be sure when it
adds the calories except it's between 2330 and midnight. It adds it on to
that day.

For example , yesterday (UK) at 2330 calories burned were about 2995. Then
when I checked after midnight they were 3500 for that day.

Thanks!

[JohnnyRow]

I've not seen significant differences for BMR between Fitbit and any on-line calculators.  I forget which formula Fitbit uses but I haven't seen much difference between any of the formulas and on-line calculators.  Now if you are talking about estimates of say total calories burned per day for certain degree of activity, that totally different from BMR.

You can get a good estimate of your Fitbit BMR, assuming you put in your real measurements, by looking at overnight calorie burn chart, and reading  minimum value per 15 minutes and multiply that out to 24 hours to get y our daily BMR.  The do an online search for BMR calculator and see how much they differ.  Here's the first one I get

https://www.calculator.net/bmr-calculator.html

and I mean just basic BMR, not calorie burn based on activity level.

[MBJ006]

Hi,

I know that. I'm talking about total calories (bmr and exercise etc).

Anyway, I can live with that but not the sudden calorie dump at the end of
the day.

Any ideas?

[JohnnyRow · Accepted solution]

My only idea is that it's not just appearing magically by itself; you have to do more investigation on your own to verify if it is really happening every night; narrow down the time; look at your heart rate and calorie burn chart at that time and be aware of what you were doing then.  I don't believe it's just giving you an extra 500 calorie burn because your height is too small; there is an explanation only you can discover only looking at your own data.  And be careful about if you are reading the data from your phone or from your watch.  If you are just looking at your watch, it could be that it just did a sync.  The watch would be the more current data unless you keep forcing a sync every minute or two.  Maybe you have been just looking at you phone and just saw calories jump after it did a sync.  I can't tell things like that.