Fitbit overcalculating calories

[PawelS]

I dont know if I am alone in this but either my fitbit app or my fitbit charge 2 is grossly overcalculating my calories when exercising. From regular walking today (around 17000 steps) I burned 1866 calories (so that during whole day I burned around 4200 calories). This is really annoying as I am on a diet and using MFP synced with Fitbit and my values are completly off. If I ate on a 500-1000 Kcal) according to Fitbit I would still probably not lose any weight and maybe gain it. I walked for about 2h today altogether at about 4,8 km/h. Using other programmes that should be around 300 calories for my age/weight/height. Is there any setting I can change so that my calculations correct? (My weight/height is put in correctly in my app/account

[JohnnyRow]

I can't be sure without knowing your personal stats, but I would like to see any source saying you burn only 300 calories walking 9.6 km.  One chart I am looking at says that could only be from weighing less than 100 pounds, which wouldn't sound like you would be on a diet, unless to gain weight.

But apart from that I don't understand your saying Fitbit says you burned 4200 calories but you will gain weight if you eat 500-1000 calories.

[PawelS]

Hi,

Thank you for your responce. I might have written everything to fast and not being articulate enough.

I used calorie burned calculators such as:

http://www.mydr.com.au/tools/calories-burned-calculator (gives me value of 620 for 4.8km/h for 120 min)

https://www.healthstatus.com/calculate/cbc/  (gives me value of roughly 850 for 4.8km/h for 120 min)

So I might have slightly exaggerated the amount of calories burned. Nevertheless Fitbit gives me a value of 1866 which seems to be well and above both of those values.

I used those values for about a month and had a kcalorie deficit averaging around 800-1000 from the numbers calculated by fitbit (I used food scale for all my foods and recorded everything in MFP, all foods were nonprocessed). Over the course of a month I lost about 500g (thats roughly 1,1 pound), my scale is pretty exact and I measured 4 times (after every week) at the same time.

I double checked and all my data on fitbit (the one that I put in) is correct so I dont understand why I am getting such high overshots on the kcalories burned.

I am mostly looking for advice how to get fitbit to give me a more accurate readings as everything else with my Fitbit works fine except for the calorie tracking.

Lastly the 4200 kcal that were mentioned were the kcal burned for that particular day when I walked for 120 min at speed of 4.8km/h that were calculated by Fitbit, as in how many kcalories I burned over the course of a whole day (so 1866 kcal from exercise and 2334 BMR). I used those values to calculate my 800-1000kcal deficit per day and that gave me a 500g (1,1 pound) weight loss after 1 month.

[JohnnyRow · Accepted solution]

I'm looking at this just from the calories burned viewpoint.  I'm not considering how much you have eaten, how much you have lost or gained, etc.

So you are saying fitbit calculated you burned 4200 calories for the day.  And your BMR is 2334 calories per day.  So you are subtacting 2334 from 4200 to get 1866 calories burned above BMR for the day.  And you are figuring that is all from your 2 hour walk, which is not correct, unless you spent all the rest of your day lying in bed motionless.  It sounds like you are assuming you are either doing a workout or at BMR, which is not true.  Just being awake, typing that into a computer, you are above your BMR.

I suggest you look at the fitbit.com dashboard (click 'Dashboard' near top right of this page).  Select Calories Daily on the wide graph to see calories burned throughout the day.  The graph will not be totally flat all day, except for the time of your walk.