Fitbit Charge 6 Calorie burn

[khazal22]

Hello! I purchased a fitbit charge 6 yesterday and I was wondering how accurate people think the calorie burn is. I wore it overnight and it told me that I had burned 1300 calories while sleeping last night. I do roll around quite a bit, but that's gotta be excessive.

[MrBosco]

In this case the Fitbit is showing you an estimate of calories burned from your breathing and heart beats etc. - known as your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) these are the calories burned just keeping you alive, independent from calories burned through exercise for example.  The BMR element of your daily figures for calories burned are based on your age, gender, height and weight and are thought to be relatively accurate.

From the Fitbit support website:

[NicoleBru]

Same, I got one for Christmas and it shows activity for Dec 23 and 24 when it hadn't even been removed from the box. The box was still sealed.

My calories burned since 12 am, while sleeping, seem inaccurate. It also said I took 276 steps between those hours when I was in bed and all I did was get up once in the middle of the night. 

I'm hoping this wasn't a waste of money. My phone step counter seems more realistic.

[MrBosco]

I saw activity for days before I opened the box too.  I think Fitbit populates new accounts with 'dummy' data for some reason though I can't imagine why they might do that.

The device will count steps for almost any arm movement. I once went past the 10,000 steps in a day mark while I was sorting socks and not actually stepping at all at that moment.  I do find the step count useful for getting an overall picture of my activity from day to day and as a goal for daily exercise but I ignore the small numbers as they don't mean much.  My favorite feature by far is being able to see maps of my walking routes (when GPS is enabled) and seeing the route color coded by my heartrate - seeing the effects that walking up small hills has on keeping my heartrate up for example.

I do have a big problem with the numbers for calories burned though.  On days when I'm not very active Fitbit gives me calorie burn numbers that match online BMR calculators reasonably closely, but on more active days the numbers it produces for me can be very silly.  As I understand it the Charge 6 primarily uses heartrate to estimate calorie burn from exercise.  I don't understand how it works but it's something I would very much like to see fixed and I believe Fitbit can do much better than they currently do when it comes to tracking calories burned during simple exercise like walking.

https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Manage-Weight/How-accurate-are-your-Energy-Burned-numbers/m-p/551337...