Does this sound right? :/

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karirenae
karirenae Posts: 106 Member
My fitbit charge HR gave me 664 calories for 8k steps.. i dont exercise, these are just steps.. seems weird, but i wear my fitbit all the time, so it should know my body by now. I seem to always get high earned calories compared to some people saying they get 300 back for 8k steps, idk if it goes off my hr or what :( does this seem like it could be right?

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  • andream0423
    andream0423 Posts: 14 Member
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    Not sure if I'm correct or not - but I believe it depends on your weight. So a 150lbs person burns x calories for 30 min of walking while a 300lb person burns more calories doing the same 30 min of walking. Usually fitbit has your weight so this might be the difference between your 664 calories compared to another's 300 calories burned.
    Again - not sure this is it but just a thought.
  • Pirnie13
    Pirnie13 Posts: 26 Member
    edited November 2018
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    It all depends what your activity level is set to on MFP.

    I set mine to sedentary and so 8k steps can easily equate to 700 exercise calories (I'm 6ft4 and 100kg). However if I were set to a medium activity it would be much lower as some of that burn would be accounted for in the activity level setting. Maybe around 2-300?

    The other thing to consider is if you have an HR based tracker it's not just steps that count. I find I get more exercise calories if I'm working on my feet all day than if I'm sat at my desk a lot even if the final step count is similar.
  • heybales
    heybales Posts: 18,842 Member
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    If a HR-based tracker is seeing enough steps with elevated HR, it'll slip into HR-based calorie burn.
    They try to learn your resting HR and other stats to prevent that when it should be used.

    Because that is the most inaccurate level of using HR-based calorie burn formula - at either end of the workout range - walking or sprinting.

    Walking for exercise would be best to use step-based calorie burn - same as daily life. even running if distance was accurate would be better. (except lots of hills leads to inaccuracy there, but still better than HR)

    You should review your 24 hr graph for steps to find the highs, then over to calories to confirm no extra high burns.

    But that level does seem right easily.

    I get adjustments to Sedentary reaching about 4K steps. but those are serious steps with distance, not a bunch of grocery store shuffle.

    If your stride length is correctly set for avg daily pace - not grocery store shuffle and not exercise pace walking - the daily is likely a good estimate.
    Unless the HR-based is kicking in frequently for 10 blocks of time.

    If you have elevated HR because of genetics or meds - probably need to disable HR except during higher intensity workouts.