fitbit burns down?

psychod787

I have noticed, as I have actually become more active recently, my fitbit burns have actually decrease for the same amount of movement. Weight relatively stable, actually increased my cals from 3200 to 3330 to acount for the activity. Weight between low 176 to high 181.6. Trends down about a pound over the last 2 weeks, but , that is really just white noise. Not enough to account for a 150-200 calorie a day decrease. Any thoughts?

JaydedMiss

my fitbit spazzed out last week and put me as burning a good 2k calories over what would ever be possible (said 4.5k off a 10k step day xD every day surrounding it was about half the calories for 20kish) So im also interested in anyone elses stories on why fitbit does its fitbit things lol

have you triple checked it hasnt edited your weight at all? mine did a few times and my burns reflected it

psychod787

JaydedMiss wrote: »

my fitbit spazzed out last week and put me as burning a good 2k calories over what would ever be possible (said 4.5k off a 10k step day xD every day surrounding it was about half the calories for 20kish) So im also interested in anyone elses stories on why fitbit does its fitbit things lol

have you triple checked it hasnt edited your weight at all? mine did a few times and my burns reflected it

I log my weight 6 days a week, so yes I have. Also have noticed RHR is down from 53 to 49. Maybe its just a fluke, but I might need to back down on activity. Went averaging 14700 steps a day to 16500 in the last month. that should not burn more than the 130 calorie increase I think?

JaydedMiss

psychod787 wrote: »

JaydedMiss wrote: »

my fitbit spazzed out last week and put me as burning a good 2k calories over what would ever be possible (said 4.5k off a 10k step day xD every day surrounding it was about half the calories for 20kish) So im also interested in anyone elses stories on why fitbit does its fitbit things lol

have you triple checked it hasnt edited your weight at all? mine did a few times and my burns reflected it

I log my weight 6 days a week, so yes I have. Also have noticed RHR is down from 53 to 49. Maybe its just a fluke, but I might need to back down on activity. Went averaging 14700 steps a day to 16500 in the last month. that should not burn more than the 130 calorie increase I think?

i mean thats 2k steps a day thats about a mile. And thats averaged out meaning some days your doing much more. so ya thats weird. My fitbit seems to add calories faster once i hit a certain step count...generally after 15-20k. Were backwards. curious to see someone else reply

psychod787

I have lost a monkey ton of weight over the years. Could be metabolic slowdown? HMMM... I giess I will just have to watch my trends.

AnnPT77

psychod787 wrote: »

JaydedMiss wrote: »

my fitbit spazzed out last week and put me as burning a good 2k calories over what would ever be possible (said 4.5k off a 10k step day xD every day surrounding it was about half the calories for 20kish) So im also interested in anyone elses stories on why fitbit does its fitbit things lol

have you triple checked it hasnt edited your weight at all? mine did a few times and my burns reflected it

I log my weight 6 days a week, so yes I have. Also have noticed RHR is down from 53 to 49. Maybe its just a fluke, but I might need to back down on activity. Went averaging 14700 steps a day to 16500 in the last month. that should not burn more than the 130 calorie increase I think?

I doubt that the answer is "back off", unless you want to for other reasons. If your RHR went up, that might be a "back off" signal (of overtraining in the technical sense), as I understand it.

If your RHR went down, that's more likely to be a sign that your CV fitness is improving. If your fitness increases, your HR during an activity X at Y intensity for Z duration will decrease, all other things being equal. (It doesn't mean you're doing less work, or burning fewer calories doing the work, it just means you're more adapted to the activity.)

Is your Fitbit a HR-based one?

I know that Fitbit uses some fancy algorithmic tap-dancing, and I gather from what others say (I don't use one) that it even learns more about you along the way, but fundamentally HR can be a misleading factor in algorithms. For the constant XYZ kind of scenario above, your HR will tend to be lower when fitter, higher when dehydrated, lower when environment is cooler/higher when it's hotter, higher under psychological or physical but non-calorie-burning stress, and various other confounding things.

It's all just estimates. 200 calories in a base of 3000-some isn't that much, really.

yirara

psychod787 wrote: »

JaydedMiss wrote: »

my fitbit spazzed out last week and put me as burning a good 2k calories over what would ever be possible (said 4.5k off a 10k step day xD every day surrounding it was about half the calories for 20kish) So im also interested in anyone elses stories on why fitbit does its fitbit things lol

have you triple checked it hasnt edited your weight at all? mine did a few times and my burns reflected it

I log my weight 6 days a week, so yes I have. Also have noticed RHR is down from 53 to 49. Maybe its just a fluke, but I might need to back down on activity. Went averaging 14700 steps a day to 16500 in the last month. that should not burn more than the 130 calorie increase I think?

The resting HR function in Fitbit is actually really, really poor. You'd think your resting HR is the lowest possible it records. But more often than not it's kind of a low-ish number that depends a lot on at what time you synch your fitbit. If I wake up, stay in bed for another half hour and synch in bed then I get lower resting HR numbers than when I get up right away and synch. It also seems that Fitbit takes previous measurements into account somehow, maybe via a moving average. If your previous few measurements were a bit higher then a new one will likely be higher as well even if something happened and you'd end up with really, really low HR, and the other way around.

I've had lots of discussion with fitbit about it but they don't seem to understand how their own stuff works, really. So I gave up and just accept that my 'resting HR' is higher on days where I oversleep or have plans earlier in the morning while there's literally no change to the sleeping HR.