Higher Than Normal Total Calories Burned On FitBit

WinoGelato

Anyone experiencing a jump in their total Cals Burned number leading to a bigger than usual exercise adjustment on MFP? I noticed it a couple days ago that when I usually have an adjustment of 300-400 cals for my steps and exercise, I suddenly was seeing 500-600 cals.

At first I thought MFP and FitBit weren't synching right again and something was getting double counted but when I looked back at my Fitbit dashboard it looks like it is coming from there.

19,500 steps and a circuit workout on Monday: 2298 calories.
16,400 steps and same circuit workout on Thurs:
2494 calories.

Similar inflated numbers on Friday and Saturday. Happy to have some extra cals to enjoy but I've been using FitBit for 3 years and have been maintaining using my Total Cals burned as my TDEE and it's been accurate so I don't think suddenly my maintenance level increasing by 200/day would be a good idea...

Christine_72

I haven't seen a difference in calorie burns, but i did notice i wasn't getting any "intense" green bars on my graph at all when i should have. It went from at least 10 a day down to moderate/light for every walk.
I did a restart on my fitbit and now I'm getting the green bars where they should be. I have the Alta, not sure if all fitbits have a restart button.

Doing a restart is the first thing they advise over on the fitbit forums when something goes wonky.

heybales

A slightly change in formula for BMR adding mere 0.13 cal/min would cause that in a day.

Since Fitbit does roundup in the daily calorie burn graph per 5 min block - not sure that sort of change would even be noticed, but could certainly look on those 2 comparison days. (my other post I forgot about that rounding).
Perhaps the 15 min block during sleep would show it actually.

Was the stride length stat perhaps manually set and now back at default?

Which device are you using? - I could see tweaks to a HR-based device calorie burn easier than BMR changes.
Can you see if it was the workout that mainly got the increase?

WinoGelato

@heybales - thanks for the ideas. I use a FitBit Charge HR (switched from the Flex to the Charge about 6 weeks ago). I have never done a custom stride length so unless they changed it on me, I don't think that is it.

I did go back and look at the total calories burned compared to active minutes on my dashboard and I definitely think you can see a correlation and the dates match when I started noticing higher burns as of last Thursday (10/13). It actually isn't only on days I have other exercise added in, the calorie burns related to step count has been higher too, pretty significantly. Since I've had a FitBit for over 3 years and my activity is pretty consistent week to week, I know what kind of burns to expect and what kind of adjustments I would see in MFP, they are averaging about 200 extra cals/day for the last 5 days - whether I exercise purposefully or am just getting credit from normal activity. See the yellow highlighted area on both the Calories Burned and the Activity graphs are trending upward for the last 5 days, but the step count for those same dates is pretty significant to what I typically average (14-18K/day).

heybales

You want this compare beween days for BMR difference:






Hover over a night time block.

Hard to correlate Active Minutes with calories since it's anything greater than 3 x BMR.

You want to actually compare the calorie burn in the workout record.
Do you make a specific workout record for the workout - or is it just buried in the daily stats?

You want to compare 2 workout records like this:


That might give a hint as to where it's going wrong.

Perhaps a reset will do the trick, but troubleshooting that by tier 1 - oh forget it. Likely not to even understand the issue or the fact you've narrowed it down like you have.

WinoGelato

@heybales - here is some more sample data from my dashboard. Just to clarify - the only thing I log separately as a workout is when I do circuit training, which is about 3/week. I log that into MFP but it carries into FitBit. It looks like when I look at the Activity History that FitBit is creating entries for my walks, but that is done by the system/tool, not by me. I actually never realized it was doing that...

So here is a week's worth of data - I first noticed an increase in my calorie adjustment on MFP on Thursday Oct 13th. As you can see from the screen shots - the step counts fluctuate between 15K-18K for the last 7 days.
The total calories burned though, seems to be disproporationally higher to me, even on a day when my step count was a bit lower, the calorie burns are still above my yearly average of 2193. When I looked at one day as you suggested, choosing last Friday as that was the one that really caught my attention initially, there doesn't seem to be anything unusual about the Calories burned during sleep times, ie my BMR.








To illustrate why I am noticing this, I pulled my MFP report for Calorie Adjustments for the last month. See the cluster of the last 7 days? Starting 5 days ago I saw a marked jump in the calorie adjustments - not that I never get big adjustments, but not for consecutive days which I think this 30 day graph shows.




I didn't open a ticket but I had posted in a thread on FitBit where someone else commented about seeing higher than normal calorie burns, and the FitBit community advisor tried to explain how activity levels fluctuate on a daily basis and maybe the outside air temperature was causing me to work harder burning more calories... Um it's October in Missouri dude. The temps have been higher than average for this time of year, but certainly not more than August.

I don't know, it's weird. I'm going to keep an eye on it but something isn't right. I've had my FitBit for 3 years and my activity has been pretty consistent so I usually notice when things change.

kaylajane11

Yesterday and today I noticed I had a bunch of activity minutes that certainly weren't during times I was active; most of them were when I was sitting at my desk at work. I've never seen this before and probably wouldn't have noticed it, until I synced to MFP and had a huge calorie adjustment. So far today I again have some active minutes that I was not active for.