Dinner calorie prediction always too small. What do you do?

[Pennyhero]

I am sure I am not alone in this problem and I was wondering if others have a solution:

The calorie budget estimate seems to be realtime, which is a problem especially in the evenings for me. It always estimates my budget for dinner time to be much too small. 

Basically every day at dinner time despite the fact that I eat tiny breakfasts and tiny lunches, it always says I have an unreasonably small number of calories in my budget for dinner, which I know is false, but it means I can't use the app to help me plan my dinner size. 

For example today: I ate about 300 calories for breakfast and about 300 calories for lunch, and the app is telling me that I only have 200 calories available in my budget for dinner... Which is totally unreasonable and unhealthy, and seems to indicate that it ignores the fact that I won't be eating anything else for the rest of the day all the way til midnight. 

Almost every day I wake up and look at the previous day's graph and learn that by midnight I was very very under budget because the app does such a poor job predicting how many calories I can have at dinner. 

How do you deal with this? I get that the app is trying to be intelligent, but I wish it would take meal-TIMES into account rather than doing it's prediction in realtime all the way to midnight. 

I need to know if today is a 500 calorie dinner night or if I can have 600 or 700 calories, but the app just doesn't give me predictions that are helpful in the evenings. 

What do you do in this situation?

[Veekay00]

It's been awhile since I have had a fitbit, so I'm new to this new way that calories are counted. It really threw me off the first day too. I did my best to estimate how much I would burn by just living after dinner based on the calories I burned while existing between meals during the day - if that makes sense?  For example, I have "burned" 300 calories between the time I woke up and when I had breakfast. If I am over by a little bit, then I will just add another walk after dinner, or do some squats, play with my dogs, whatever you feel like.

[emili]

If you look at your previous day's data you will see how many calories are in your daily allotment. Use that data to figure out how much you need for your first, second and third meal. If you plan to be more active, you can bank the calories burned or use some of them or all of them the next day. Your weight is a weekly average not a daily struggle. If you are in deficit as your average, then you should be losing the amount of weight your deficit is lined up to be. If you have a BMR of 1500 calories per day, plan your meals to that number. Any additional calories you burn for the day can be attributed to your deficit or you can use them as part of your meal planning and up your calories out to 1700 per day. 

[PoodleMamaof7]

A couple of things... it makes a big difference which setting you use for your plan intensity: easier, medium, kinda hard or harder. I use "easier" because I know I'm going to control my total calories with or without fitbit's calorie budget. The other thing, you can change your daily calorie estimate from "personalized" to "sedentary"... with the latter, you earn calories throughout the day so based on your example, you'll end up with more calories remaining (to consume) at the end of the day. That does confuse me, though, so I stick with personalized. Why does this have to be so complicated 🙂 Good luck!