Total burned calories and active minutes go down when I add exercise

[Brookeeellis]

Yesterday I went on a 35 minute walk that my Fitbit didn’t automatically add so I manually added it but when I did my total calories burned and total active minutes for the day went DOWN instead of up. I updated to the newest version of the app, checked that my IOS is updated, and tried to add the walk again—same thing, it made my burned calories and active minutes for the day decrease. Why is this happening? It doesn’t make sense at all

[JohnnyRow]

When your walk was not recorded as a workout, the data for it still accumulated in the daily totals for steps, calories, active minutes, based on the actual data recorded.

However, when you manually log a workout, Fitbit uses the parameters you input to estimate these values and totally overwrites the actual recorded data fir that time with your input.  So if your daily calories went down, it means what fitbit estimated from your input parameters was lower than the actually recorded value.  Depending on your input parameters, it could go the other direction too.  It is as if Fitbit is assuming the reason you are manually logging the workout is because you were not wearing the tracker.  So it ignores anything that might have been actually recorded during that time.

A couple of options:

1)  Just let it go, being content to know that your daily totals will be correct even though it did not actually log it as a workout.

2)  If you have a fitbit model that has the Exercise App, as most do, use that to record the workout, starting and stopping it on your wrist.  Anything recorded this way will be recorded as a workout.

As to why it was not recorded as a walk for you originally, that's a different issue that I cannot answer, unless you were taking breaks, making the workout look shorter than the minimum time for auto-recognition - 15 minutes by default.