Calories too high

Hi there,

I have recently obtained a fenix 5x. I am happy with most of its features, but the way calories are counted is a mess. I am getting way too high active calories through steps. For example, I earned about 500 calories from running today (which is in a reasonable frame). In addition, I had approx. 15.000 steps and Garmin accounted me incredible 900 calories for that, which is completely unrealistic.

I am wearing the device 24/7, so the device should get enough information to obtain realistic values. Anybody else having these problems? Is there a solution out already?

Cheers

Mine has always so drastically overestimated my calorie burn I just quit paying attention to it. During activities like a run when I'm wearing my HRM Run strap it seems to reflect an accurate burn, however it gives me far too many "active calories" throughout the day for doing next to nothing. I've simply gone to manually adding whatever calories I burn during an exercise to my BMR (which again Garmin waaaaay overestimates despite artificially lowering my activity level) to get an accurate daily number. Otherwise it's consistently around 500-1000 kcal's too high. I wish at least garmin would let us enter our own BMR as well as stop counting walking to the bathroom from the couch as "active calories". Until then it's pretty useless for an accurate count, especially if you're depending on it being linked to awesome apps such as myfitnesspal

Here is what the chat support told me when I asked about the calories counting problem:
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I will put forth the feedback, as you have said you are not the first person to request more information for that one. And the more times we hear about something the more likely it is to be a change.
I do have to say as of right now I have not heard of it coming down the pipeline I just don't want to set the expectation of it coming around the bend. But it is feedback we hear and are looking to improve upon.
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Everyone who has this problem should then contact Garmin, otherwise it won't be fixed.

As far as I can tell, Garmin's BMR number includes the standard convention of including a 20% allowance above BMR for daily non-exercise activities - this 20% average is relatively uncontroversial. But as an activity tracker, the 5X (and Garmin's other devices) picks this up and measures it directly. Effectively, this means Garmin is double-counting daily non-exercise activities, which explains why it is consistently overestimating.