4500 calories for a 17km walk

[Wendle_]

So I have just purchased a charge 3. So far i like it however the calorie tracker is a little bit over zealous.

Today i walked 17km which should be roughly 1200 kcals, with a generous passive kcal i should be around 3000 for today however the fitbit thinks I'm on 4500kcals for today. I've googled this issue extensively and cannot make any headway. I have found a post about calorie estimation needing to be turned off, but the suggested fix took me to menus that don't exist. 

Thanks in advance

[Heybales · Accepted solution]

It was likely using HR-based calorie burn formula - not nearly as accurate as distance-based formula.

As such, Fitbit makes improvements over first couple weeks of use for some figures used in that HR-based formula - so you likely got the worst inflated estimate possible.

Better method to get back to distance-based formula, while still tracking HR during the walk.

Start your Activity Record as normal so you have start/stop/duration time.

Go create a Workout Record for walking, using start/duration that is correct, put in correct distance, use the Fitbit formula provided calorie burn.

It won't include extra effort going up/down hills, but unless that's a major part of the walk for steep hill, not that big a deal.

You may think you are looking at 2 workouts - but the Activity Record is merely a snapshot of the Fitbit stats for that chunk of time.

The manually created Workout Record replaced those stats for distance and calorie burn in the daily stats though - so no double counting.

For that long of a walk - the distance provided by Fitbit is based on a stride length setting and may be wrong too.

You don't want the setting based on exercise pace, nor grocery store shuffle, but rather the midpoint for all daily steps (that's where some daily calorie burn comes from) - so maybe 1.8 mph for most. May want to test a known distance track for 1/2 mile and confirm Fitbit got the distance right.