Calories burned - confused

[lubra1]

I'm confused as to how calories burned gets calculated as they don't seem to match my activity.

For example, yesterday I had a higher step count, kilometres, floors and active minutes than on Friday, and yet my calories burned was lower overall. See images below. Would be interested to know why.

Also I'd consider yesterday a pretty good day and yet I only just hit my calories burned target (which was calculated for me by Fitbit - I never changed it). Is there some secret thing I should be doing to achieve it as I only manage it about a third of the time even though I always hit 12,000+ steps and plenty of floors and active minutes.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

[SteveH]

I think there may be two things that are confusing the picture here.

Firstly, your BMR calories. These are the calories you burn just keeping your body alive (even when asleep). You burn these at a constant rate day and night and for many people they form the majority of their daily calories burn. This means that additional calories burned through activity have a less than perhaps expected impact on the total.

http://help.fitbit.com/articles/en_US/Help_article/How-does-Fitbit-know-how-many-calories-I-ve-burne...

The other thing that may be confusing is that there isn't a fixed number of calories burned per minute when active. Instead, fitbit continuously monitors activity and calculates calories throughout the day. This can give strange looking results where a higher step count can give a lower calorie burn depending on how those steps were spread out.

Basically, it's a bit of a black art and, in the end, we have to trust that fitbit knows what it's doing.

[TandemWalker]

Hi @lubra1. Just to queue in to @SteveH's excellent post, I also notice that the screen shot on the right shows a Fitbit One still syncing. Were the results the same once the sync was completed?  

And by the way, Steve is spot on. Two consecutive days, with more or less the same step counts, can indeed show totally different calories burned on your dashboard. Your Fitbit One not only counts your steps but also calculates your energy expenditure by assessing the intensity and pace of your steps minute-by-minute throughout the whole day. So 5,000 daily routine steps would likely lead to a much lower burn than 5,000 steps taken in the context of an energetic walk/jog workout.

Cheers! 

             TW             

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[lubra1]

Thanks so much for responding. Interestingly on the day I burnt most calories my steps were spread across the day whilst I did one long run on the other day. I had wondered if you burnt more calories if you spread steps across the day compared to if you were sedentary with bursts of exercise - but your post seems to imply the opposite?

[TandemWalker]

Hi again @lubra1. Your understanding is correct - you do not burn more calories with routine steps spread throughout the day. Steps taken during a walk or jog workout will burn significantly more calories per minute than routine steps per minute because of the intensity of the pace.

             TW             

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