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Inaccurate Calorie Estimates

Former Member
Former Member

Anyone else having issues with wildly inaccurate calorie estimates recently?

On Wednesday I walked 8 miles and my watch says I burned 188 calories. Someone of my height, weight, gender, and age should burn about 400 over that distance. Today I walked 4 miles, climbed 26 flights of stairs, and stood all day for a total of 31 active calories. Compared with past recordings of similar activities, these are completely different. My tracked workouts are wrong, too. Far too low. I biked an hour indoors at 17 mph, totaling 17 miles. The watch reported 289 calories, which includes my RMR for that hour. This does not match previous data, and is far less than any online calculator estimates for that workout. 

I contacted support and they had me do a hard reset, since they were baffled about what the problem could be. After an hour of setting the watch back up, I’m having the same issues. Four calories burned on a brisk half mile walk. Really? And then those “four calories” vanished from the app, and the estimate went back to what it was before the walk (31), after about 30 seconds. 

And yes, my height and weight are accurate. I haven’t changed my heart rate zones or activity class. My heart rate data is more or less the same as it has been. Neither the support tech nor I can come up with any explanation.

Anyone else?

  • Are you looking at calories for the activity, or calories including those from your BMR?  Sounds like you are looking at the calories specifically from the activity, not including those from your BMR

  • Former Member
    0 Former Member over 4 years ago

    Is your VO2 max estimate functioning? Could explain why... My VO2 max estimate has been MIA for weeks and no calorie count can be trusted...

  • Former Member
    0 Former Member over 4 years ago in reply to jim_m_58

    My BMR calories (“resting”) are the same as they have been.

    What is low are both calories in recorded activities (bike rides) and calories from walking (not recorded as activities, but registered as long walking periods by the watch).

    Therefore both “activity calories” (from recorded exercise, which includes the BMR calories for that amount of time) and “active calories” (on days I haven’t recorded a workout but have walked a lot) are abnormally now.

    Essentially the watch no longer correctly records the calories I burn when moving around, whether that be in recorded activity or just walking a lot.

  • Former Member
    0 Former Member over 4 years ago in reply to Former Member

    It has only changed once since I got the watch about four months ago, going up by one point. That was at least a month ago though, some the timeline doesn’t fit with the onset of this problem.

    As for accuracy, I don’t have anything to compare it to. I’m a pretty athletic 25 yo woman and it says mine is 49, which seems reasonable enough.