Trusting calories burned

[tigger_lkj]

From all the posts I've read...

its safe to say that once you've entered your profile information (height, weight, etc.),  and you've logged your food intake, that you can trust the displayed calories burned?

Ive had my Blaze for less than a week and calories burned just seems so high! 

I've always had a slightly higher heart rate, just want to know that I can trust it

[wtksk8r]

My wife and I find the Fitbit numbers to be good and we have been on weight maintenance for the last three to four years now. I suggest the first thing you do is compare the Base Metabolic Rate (BMR) that Fitbit assigns to you against the various BMR calculators available on the internet. Look at the calorie expenditure Fitbit gives you when you sleep as an estimate of your Fitbit BMR.

Some years ago my wife and I used the BodyMedia device to lose a lot of weight. We decided to look for another device for a variety of reasons and finally settled on Fitbit. I had about a 3 month transition period where I had both BM and Fitbit to be able to perform comparisons.  The results are shown here. I have a separate post somewhere where I compared the two devices when skating and the results are quite similar.

Note that the comparisons were made before the introduction of the heart rate monitor and probably lots of tweaks to the algorithms for calorie estimates but so far we have done quite well with using the numbers to maintain our weights over the last 4 or so years.

Hope this helps.