Charge 3 nowhere near as accuate as my Charge HR

Angierae75

Hi, everyone! I recently upgraded from a Charge HR to a Charge 3, and suddenly it's giving me mountains of calories. I lost fifty pounds using just a vanilla Fitbit and later an Alta, and my Charge HR was fine while I was maintaining. I recently had a transplant surgery and the prednisone I'm on for life caused me to gain back 30 pounds, so I'm trying to get that off.

I bought a Charge 3, and set myself to sedentary like I have always done, but now when I get 6k steps its giving me 700 exercise calories! I used to get about 400 if I hit 10k steps. I thought it might be because my heart rate is high due to my meds, so I adjusted that so I had to hit 110 to get in to the "fat burn" zone, and now I only get up in there occasionally throughout the day, but it still gave me 700 exercise calories yesterday!

I can ignore them, and just eat what I know I'm burning at this weight and activity level (I should be eating about 1500-1600 calories) but I would really like this to be remotely accurate.

Any suggestions?

(I'm 5'1" and back up to about 200 pounds right now. Even at 225, I wasn't eating 2k a day to lose weight.)

heybales

So just info, your HR settings for the visual zone levels doesn't change the HR calorie burn formula.
I recall doing some testing with someone when the initial ability to change HRmax became available - no change to a workout of exact same HR. Perhaps that has changed.
But you can't go by just looking at MFP adjustment - must do some actual careful tests if you want to find that out.

If HR is incorrectly being used for daily activity stuff (and it would be logging it as a workout then too) then you'll keep getting inflated calorie burn.

And it could be the med's are giving you an inflated HR for equal activity.

So this is an MFP issue, this is totally on Fitbit giving a higher daily calorie burn figure.

Some tweaks for accuracy.
If you do have a higher HR now than prior on average or for workouts - turn of HR monitor except when doing workouts. And frankly for walking/running - distance for calories is more accurate than HR anyway if HR not really needed.

Ever walked a known 1/2 to 1 mile distance and confirmed the Fitbit saw the distance correctly?
May have to adjust the stride length for new device or new location it's on your body.

400 extra for 10K steps actually sounds very low - that's now getting up into MFP Active and beyond level - I think that device was underestimating.

Now, 700 for 6K is inflated indeed - but the difference only appears bigger because of that underestimated prior.
I would start seeing 100-200 @ 4-5K, so 400 @ 6K depending on distance (since it's distance, not steps, that gives calories) could be reasonable.