Does Fitbit overestimate calorie burn?

[kesgardner]

I have a Fitbit Ionic. Some testing and research tells me that it overestimates calorie burn by double-counting some BMR calories as Active Calories. For example, my Mifflin St Joer BMR is 1760 and even Fitbit itself thinks it’s at least 1704, but subtracting yesterday’s active calories from total calories yields a BMR of only 1476. That’s way too low.  

Because active calories are used to increase the amount of food I can supposedly eat without gaining weight, a “rounding error” of 200 to 250 calories a day will result in slow but sure weight gain — and that’s exactly what I have experienced myself. As a double check, I cut my food budget by a little more than this amount to see if I can reverse the trend. So far, so good. 

Everything else about Fitbit is awesome. If they can fix this problem — and both Google and this forum tells me that I’m not the only one who has noticed it — it would be even more awesome. 

[LanuzaFitbit]

Hello @kesgardner.

Thank you very much for bringing this up.

I'll be passing this on to the team! We truly appreciate any and all feedback we can get. We're always looking for ways to improve the overall Fitbit experience so that our users are as happy as possible.

Feel free to let me know if you have any questions.

[holicisms]

try eating less! 🙂