Calories in/out not making sense

[LindsyDPf]

My calorie intake goal is 1300. My out goal is 2460. Today I’ve taken in 1100 and burned 3800 yet the intake bar is pink as if I’m over my intake goal for the day. Am I missing something? Compared to other days, it should either be blue or green.. and my calories out is way above other days as well (gym and deep cleaned the house). Is there a factor to this calculation I’m missing?

[MrMarv]

@LindsyDPf - 

Your intake and out goals, when it come to the bar chart do no come into play, but I will be glad to tell you what, in my opinion, does.

Associated with the bar chart you are apparently referencing, let's talk about the value "cals left for the day".

That calculation is:

Remaining BMR + Calories burned - deficit - Calories in = Calories left to eat

Calories burned are on the Food page

Calories in are also on the Food page

Deficit is only shown at one place and that is on the web dashboards Log tab on the Food page in the Food Plan panel which looks like this:

Remaining BMR is a separate calculation before the value is placed into the calculation above. BMR is your Basic Metabolic Rate, the amount of calories burned per minute to support your body's continued existence, heart beat, lungs expanding, feeding your various organs to include the brain. You can easily get a very close approximation of your BMR by looking at your calorie burn while sleeping. Mine is 1.2 calories a minute or 72 per hour. My wife's is 1.1 or 66 per hour. So Remaining BMR is your BMR times the number of minutes remaining until midnight.

Here is a snapshot of my food page on my phone from I believe yesterday. I say believe because it comes from my "image bank" here at Fitbit and for the purposes of this discussion we don't need to know exactly what day the image was captured.

At 2:41 pm there are 9 hours and 29 minutes left in the day, or 569 minutes. My remaining BMR is 683 calories. Taking that and my deficit and the calorie values on the food page gives us:

Remaining BMR + Calories burned - deficit - Calories in = Calories left to eat

or

683 +1691 - 500 - 1271 = 603

603 is pretty close to the 572 displayed. Remember the BMR is estimated from a chart with rounding.

Now my 603 or 572 calories left to eat are greater than my deficit, so my chart shows blue, or under.

I haven't decided the exact rule for when the green "in the zone" applies, but it appears to be at about when I get in the range between 200 - 300 calories left for the day.

At about 200 calories left for the day it goes red. I guess that is the point the app thinks it's error margin is getting tested.

I hope this helped and that I didn't bore you. I won't feel slighted if you have to read it two or three times to figure out what I'm trying to say.

Good luck and welcome to the boards.