Calories change after syncing my Versa 4

[FionaNash69]

I’m feeling a bit cheated. After a long hard walk, the number of calories that I had burnt, suddenly reduced by about 800 for no apparent reason. Surely I can’t un burn them. Any ideas?

Moderator Edit: Clarified subject

[MarreFitbit]

Hi there, @FionaNash69. Welcome to the Fitbit Community Forums. I'm sorry to hear that your Versa 4 lost calories you burned during a long hard walk. I understand how you must be feeling. I'll be glad to help you and figure out what could've happened. 

To better assist you, may I know if you also lost any other data besides the calories? When was the last time syncing your Fitbit device? While reading your post, it seems like your Fitbit device was not able to sync lately (I mean, not just the day you posted here, but previous days).

If the above describes your situation, that would explain the issue you're having now. Going a bit deeper into this, note that most Fitbit devices store up to 7 days of detailed minute-by-minute data. If you wait longer than 7 days before syncing, you may only see the most recent week's detailed data. Summary data (calories, distance, steps, and floors) will be stored for 30 days. Nevertheless, if your Fitbit device was unpaired from your Fitbit account during this period of time, neither the 7 days can be recovered or restored. 

Nevertheless, if you remember the exact amount of steps or the name of the activity you performed, you can try manually logging the activity. For more information, see How do I manually log exercises in the Fitbit app?

Let me know if you have any questions.

[FionaNash69]

Hi, the problem only happens when I link to Strava. Everything was tracking fine on Fitbit till I added my activity to Strava. Suddenly my calories dropped and my number of steps have increased. So I have walked hard 11.5 miles. My active zone minutes are at 393 and my calories burnt have dropped down to 1823 (before the starve update it was about 2700 calories which would make more sense). 

[MarreFitbit]

@FionaNash69 Thanks for getting back and letting me know that all this happened after linking your Fitbit app to Strava. That would explain this whole situation. 

As a first approach, please note with Strava you can track run and bike exercises only, which makes me think that you manually log the walk activity right? If that was the case, to bring back your original data, I suggest deleting this activity that was manually entered. 

To go a little bit deeper into this, please note that the effect is that Fitbit overwrites the steps your device recorded with estimated steps (derived from your stride length) based on the distance that Strava recorded.  You can get the device recorded steps to reappear by deleting the run record that was imported from Strava.  This inconvenience does not occur when you import a bike record from Strava because it is treated as a manual bike entry (and bike distance is not added to your cumulative weekly/monthly/lifetime distance totals or converted to steps).

My suggestion would be to use the Fitbit app to record your run instead of (or in addition to) Strava. When you use the Fitbit app, the GPS distance recorded is used by Fitbit but, the steps your Fitbit device recorded are not overwritten. If you use Strava for the same run (because you want the activity in Strava as well) just remember to delete the run that was recorded from Fitbit so it does not overwrite your steps (the imported Strava run will look different from the run recorded on your Fitbit app because it will not have the map). 

Your runs and rides tracked by Strava will contribute to your Fitbit all-day stats. If you want to export your GPS data from your Fitbit account to Strava, see How do I export my Fitbit data?

Keep in mind that the following types of activities won't sync to Strava:

• Activities from Strava are synced over to Fitbit as manually logged activities but will not include GPS or heart rate data from Strava
• NOTE: Manually logged activities in Strava will NOT sync over, it needs to be a recorded activity.
• Only GPS recorded activities from Fitbit will sync to Strava
• Heart rate data needs to be synced before ending a GPS activity for it to send to Strava
• Previous activities not recorded by Strava.
• Duplicate Activities: That is, if you've already logged an activity with Strava, a Fitbit activity performed at the same time won't sync.
  
  

Note that after linking your accounts you may see some differences in the way data is calculated for your exercises on each site. For more information, refer to Strava's Calorie Calculation article.

Hope this clarifies what happened.