Calories burned make no sense-help me understand?

Jonna13

If someone can explain how this works, I would really appreciate it. I've screen shot the past 3 days, and I just don't understand, how my calorie burn is calculated. Yesterday I had less activity and fewer steps, yet I burned more than the day before? And the day before I have 3000 steps more plus an additional 60 minutes of activity, yet I only burned 100 calories more than Sunday?

Just doesn't seem accurate to me. I eat back most of my extra calories, so want to make sure I'm doing everything right.

Any input would be awesome!

heybales

It's not just steps - it's the intensity of the steps, as indicated by the impact from them.

You could have gotten some false "steps" from some big arm activity while not moving - but they were super minor calorie burn and distance given - balancing out some time spans perhaps where you were standing but given sleeping level calorie burn.

Also - did you manually log any walking or jogging exercise?

You also can't go by the Activity minutes totally, as you must reach a certain level of activity for a full span of time (used to be 1 min) for that time to even be counted.
Meaning you could be really intense for 55 seconds and stand for 5 sec - and be given no Active time for that minute. Do that again and again and again - no active minutes.

Actually not that much variance.
Day - steps - distance - calories - steps/mile - cal/mile
Sun - 12124 - 5.13 - 2224 - 2363 - 434
Mon - 15025 - 6.36 - 2338 - 2362 - 368
Tue - 14547 - 6.16 - 2378 - 2362 - 386

2378 - 2224 = 154 / 2224 = 6.9% variance of daily calories at the biggest extreme.

Your food labels are allowed more than that - and your logging of food is probably more than that.

So in the scheme of things - pretty good even if there is inaccuracy, which we don't know.