Calorie tracking skewed?

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MrTea00
MrTea00 Posts: 3 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
Hi everyone. Got a bit of a strange issue here regarding tracking my calorie burning.

I use my smartwatch at work to give me a rough estimate of how many calories I'm burning as I'm on my feet for 9-10 hours at work walking around and climbing stairs etc. I left my watch on my wrist to find im, apparently, only burning around 250-300 calories a shift.

Today each time I finished a break and was back on my feet, I set the watch to start an exercise of walking and in total it's saying I've burnt 1780 calories by walking 10.7k

Anyone have an idea which is probably more correct than the other.

Thanks.

Replies

  • erickirb
    erickirb Posts: 12,293 Member
    edited January 2020
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    the 250-300 was probably what you burn above what you would have burned with "normal" activity. so Net calories. That 1780 is most likely gross, what you burned in total, including exercise over that time frame.
    In other words for your shift, it is saying you would have burned 30 calories an hour from work. Which is probably similar to the extra cals you would get from light active to active on MFP

    1780 for 10k of waling seems quite high, unless it includes your maintenance calories, which over 10 hours would be in the range of 900 (60*1.5*10), assuming 1.5 cals/min for 10 hours, so from "exercise" it assumes 880 so that 880 vs. the 250-300. most likely the 250-300 is more accurate as you were not exercising per se, just moving.

    instead of counting any of it, just change your activity level to the next level up on MFP and get the cals that way.
  • MrTea00
    MrTea00 Posts: 3 Member
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    erickirb wrote: »
    the 250-300 was probably what you burn above what you would have burned with "normal" activity. so Net calories. That 1780 is most likely gross, what you burned in total, including exercise over that time frame.
    In other words for your shift, it is saying you would have burned 30 calories an hour from work. Which is probably similar to the extra cals you would get from light active to active on MFP

    1780 for 10k of waling seems quite high, unless it includes your maintenance calories, which over 10 hours would be in the range of 900 (60*1.5*10), assuming 1.5 cals/min for 10 hours, so from "exercise" it assumes 880 so that 880 vs. the 250-300. most likely the 250-300 is more accurate as you were not exercising per se, just moving.

    instead of counting any of it, just change your activity level to the next level up on MFP and get the cals that way.

    Thanks for the info.

    I did as you suggested and upped my activity from lightly active to just active and removed the inflated exercise calories for today and I still have 180 calories remaining
  • MrTea00
    MrTea00 Posts: 3 Member
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    Oops, forgot to add. I'll just stick to the tracking my calories burnt without starting any exercise so it only tracks net calories burnt.

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