Calories Burned

[MeriBeri75]

Spoiler

I got my fitbit on Christmas Day, haave worn everyday since and even upped the preset goals. My goals are 12,00 steps, 40 active minutes, 20 flights of stairs, 2180 calories and five miles. How come I hit all my goals but don't make it to the 2180 calorie burn? Also, I have a severe gastric issue which leads to an inability to eat almost all solic food, so it's not my intake that's spoiling it.

[too_spicy]

Hello, and welcome to the community!

First off, I just want to say that fitbit has no idea how many calories you're burning, it's essentially just making an educated guess.

Now, what goes into this educated guess (which is actually just a mathematical algorithm) is your heart rate if you have an hr device, the speed that you're moving throughout the day, and your basal metabolic rate (which is also guesstimated via algorithm). 

So, the higher your bmr, the faster you move, and the higher your heart rate, the more calories you're going to burn throughout the day. That means that even if you're hitting all of your steps for the day, you might not be burning 2,000+ calories if you do it very slowly.

I very rarely hit my calorie goal of 2,300 calories. Last week, I only made it twice; on Monday and Tuesday. On Monday I had 16,601 steps, 7.15 miles, and 137 active minutes and burned 2,304 calories. On Tuesday, I burned 2,587 calories with 19,648 steps, 8.47 miles, and 189 active minutes.

Overall, I would say that the best thing to do would be to increase your goal for your active minutes if you want to increase your calorie burn, because active minutes are calculated based upon your movement speed. Like I said before, faster movement = more calories burned.