Can't eat as much as fitbit says I burn?

[octopamine]

Hi all,

I am a 22 year old F, and have had my fitbit for about two months. I am very active--medium to high intensity activity for about an hour every day. I normally eat about 1700 calories a day, and am very careful about tracking my food accurately. However, my fitbit tells me I burn about 2250 a day on average. If this were true, I should be losing more than a pound a week, but I am maintaining. Is the fitbit calculator just wrong? Other online calculators give me a similar calorie burn estimate. Is my metabolism just slow?

Thanks for any help!

[Dominique]

What activity level did you apply to yourself, when using online calculators? Calculators usually have 5 standard activity levels (for an example, see this one). Based on your average step count of slightly under 15k (as visible under your profile), I would put your activity level somewhere between "moderate" and "high".

For BMR, Fitbit (and calculators) use a standard equation based on gender, age, height and weight. People are distributed according to a bell curve: if you happen to be right in the middle of the curve, the estimated BMR will be accurate, but you could be an outlier on the left side (unusually low metabolism).  Metabolism is also affected by things like medical conditions (and medication to address them), weight history (yo-yo dieting) etc.

It’s not uncommon for fitbits to over-estimate calories burned. Now that you have established your real maintenance level, you can make slight adjustments until you start to see the desired change on the scale: move slightly more and/or eat slightly less (I would personally favour the former).