Calorie counts for activities

[Anjistar]

Hi,

I'm having trouble with my fairly new Fitbit One.

While I was away skiing, I started logging this manually as an activity using my phone App, which lets you enter Activity, Time started, Duration and Calories burned. For two days it was fine. The next day, it wouldn't recognise Skiing as an Activity. I just got a red line.

I abandoned it for a few days until we came home and then entered it all manually on the web site using the Dashboard on my PC. Now it is logging 7 hours downhill skiing as burning less than 1000 calories.  According to Harvard Medical School, moderate downhill skiing burns approximately 400 calories per hour. Also a 45 minute spin class is logging as 39 calories and a 45 minute kettlebells class as 26 calories.There is no way on the logging page to enter the calories manually, just the activity, date and the duration, and you can't edit it either.

What I'd like to know is, why can you enter calories manually in the App but not in Dashboard?

Why can't you edit what are patently incorrect totals?

What do you do if an Activity is not recognised?

Sorry this is a really long post, a thousand free steps if you made it this far!

A thousand more if you have answers 🙂

Thank you

Anji

[SantiR]

@Anjistar Welcome to the Fitbit Community! Try to log out from the app, reboot your phone, and log back in. Then try to enter the skiing activity again to see if it will be recognized on the app. Also, restart your tracker. It is possible to manually add calories on the online dashboard too. Check the picture I left below. 

There are other activites like spinning in which you can select the intensity to increase the calories burned. Check the next picture.

If you want to edit an activity; take a look at this article about activities. You can make sure that an activity will be recognized if you manually log it.

Hope this helps. Let me know how it goes! 

[Anjistar]

Thanks for your reply, Santifitbit. Unfortunately the box labelled Calories (optional) doesn't appear on my dashboard. I get the first three boxes and Notes, no Distance, no Calories.

I have already tried turning the phone off and on, I will try the Fitbit too. However, I was logging manually and it just wouldn't accept Skiing when I typed it in. It came up red and if I filled in the other boxes and hit enter, or whatever it is, it just scrolled back up and asked me to enter an activity.

[Anjistar]

Here is a screenshot of where I log activities via my Dashboard - no calories!

 

[VivisFitbit]

Welcome to our Community @Anjistar! This usually means that the activity you're trying to enter doesn't exist on your data base. So I recommend to add it as a new activity. To do so: 

Go to your Dashboard>Log>Activities> Enter your activity> Click on Create Custom Activity> Add Activity and voila! you get the fields to enter all the information you need.

See the screenshtos bellow for more information.    

Hope this help and good luck! 

[Anjistar]

Thanks for your message and the screenshots. However, it doesn't seem to work. I added Kettlebells and Spinning to the custom activities, refreshed the page and then tried to log this morning's Kettlebells class - still no Calories box! Here's the screenshot:

I have just found out that you have to log it in the Right hand box, NOT the Log Activities box, which is a bit counter-intuitive, really. If I click on the activity in the Activities box, I get a drop down which does allow me to enter all the info plus the calories. The Log Activities box doesn't do that.

New Screenshot:

[Colinm39 · Accepted solution]

@Anjistar I have just created what you wish to achieve. If you type Kettlebell, singular,  in the search box at the left ,  you will get the Fitbit manual activity, Kettlebell boxes, fill in the date and times and it will give you the calories.. when you update, in my case 591 for an hour..which for me isn't practical

If you use the Custom Activity you created, Kettlebells you will need to enter the calories.

See how you go...

The same with Spinning, there are two entries in the Fitbit manual records and the first one allows you to enter distance or select "I don't know distance" and you can select the intensity, and will generate the calories, the second, just generates calories.

You shouldn't have to use Custom Activities.

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@Anjistar wrote:

Thanks for your message and the screenshots. However, it doesn't seem to work. I added Kettlebells and Spinning to the custom activities, refreshed the page and then tried to log this morning's Kettlebells class - still no Calories box! Here's the screenshot:

I have just found out that you have to log it in the Right hand box, NOT the Log Activities box, which is a bit counter-intuitive, really. If I click on the activity in the Activities box, I get a drop down which does allow me to enter all the info plus the calories. The Log Activities box doesn't do that.

New Screenshot:

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[Anjistar]

Thanks Colin, exactly right.

Cheers, and I'll watch my spelling!

[Colinm39]

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@Anjistar wrote:

Thanks Colin, exactly right.

Cheers, and I'll watch my spelling!

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@Anjistar Glad we could help. I was aware of the issue because I have been 4 years into Fitbit and when they "really" pruned the Manual Activities list it caused many of these questions.

Have a great day and enjoy your activities. Midnight here...

[VivisFitbit]

Thank you so much @Colinm39 for your help for this! @Anjistar I'm glad to know that you can enter your activity's calories, I'm pretty sure that this will help you to get better results during your activities. I also want to encourage you to take a look at our Discussions board, a lot of friends are waiting for you. 

Have fun! 

[hokiefit]

The totals are still way off. Spinning is low but yoga is high. As long as you guys stop changing them it's ok to use for comparison purposes, but when you keep changing the algorithms it's not easy to compare across weeks or months.