Why does my active minute count go away when I log the active time to an activity?

[MomBee]

Sometimes when I garden, I work very hard physically and see that I have a sustained period of activity.  Since gardening is an activity - I log the minutes as gardening.  Then the minutes are taken away from my "Active Minutes" count.  I don't remember this happening for the activities that I have in my Exercise list, such as Treadmill or Walking.

Should it be doing this?

[JohnnyRow]

When you manually log an activity for a time when you were wearing the tracker, what you log overrides what the tracker already recorded.  Then whether or not you get active minute depends on how hard fitbit guesses you were working, based on the parameters you used when logging it, rather than your actual recorded heart rate that you overrode by logging it manually.  Manually logging an activity is really meant just for times when you were not wearing the tracker.

It sounds like you were relying on auto-detection to get the exercise.  The better way is to use the exercise app, starting and ending the app yourself and giving it the name you select.