How does it determine how many calories I burned?

[Grippy19]

Hi there,

Got my charge 3 a few weeks ago and Its still fairly new to me. So, I connected to a dieting app I have called Lifesum. It will subract calories it says i have burned throughout the day and display it to the app so it shows I can eat more. However when I go to the calories burned section on the app, its saying I burned 492 cals of light activity in 4 and a 1/2 hours. and 72 cals in 4 mins of high intensity exercise. and 36 calories in 5 mins of low intensity exercise. My steps today are 9,613. I worked at a coffee shop today, not much movement and i did walk around my campus for awhile. But other than maybe some light dancing by myself for a couple minutes, I don't understand where its getting that I burned so many calories? Does that seem normal. I walked around and stood around most of the day? I just wanna make sure I'm intaking the right amount of calories and not burning "fake" calories. 

[JohnnyRow]

It's hard to follow your thought.  You are talking about the Lifesum app and the Fitbit app, and then talking about what "the app" says - I can't follow which app you are talking about.  Also it would be helpful to know what Fitbit says you all-day calorie count is.

Also consider your BMR (basal metabolic rate) calories burned just by being alive explained more here: https://help.fitbit.com/articles/en_US/Help_article/1381/?q=calories&l=en_US&fs=Search&pn=1

Another, perhaps irrelevant, thought: I wonder if Lifesum is really doing anything more for you than is built into Fitbit with food plans and weight goals.

[Androidas]

"Another, perhaps irrelevant, thought: I wonder if Lifesum is really doing anything more for you than is built into Fitbit with food plans and weight goals."

I use lifesum because Fitbit doesn't have a swedish food database. That makes it to inconvenient to find food and try to convert it to the right meats and amount.

I would like to either export my lifesum-data to Fitbit or have a swedish database in Fitbit.

[michiganman]

I am new to the Fitbit Charge 3 and am trying to make sure I understand what the Fitbit app is telling me. I understand that the Fitbit estimates my calories burned based on heart rate, respirations and basal metabolic rate. Is that correct?

I have the Fitbit app linked to the MyFitness Pal app where I enter the food I eat and the estimated food calories. I also enter the estimated exercises calories burned in my daily exercises, including upper body workout on the Total Gym and endurance/interval workouts on my Octane Fitness machine. 

What I want to be sure of is that somehow I am not "double-counting" calories. My food calories consumed as recorded on the MyFitness Pal app show up on the Fitbit app so I can track net calories and move toward my weight loss goal. (A 4000 calorie total deficit equals about 1 pound of fat burned.) 

As far as I can tell, the exercise calories entered in MyFitness pal app are just there, but are not used by Fitbit to calculate my daily calorie burn. The daily calorie burn is all computed within the Fitbit app and its algorithms. Do I have that right?

Thanks for your help!