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Calorie Count wildly off?

Hi,

I bought a vivoactive 3 yesterday, and I'm having an issue with the accuracy of it's calorie count function.

It is currently 1:30PM local time and my watch is reporting that I have burned 1520 calories resting and 1333 calories through activity. This seems extremely high, I have done very little in terms of activity so far today, having only walked for roughly 45 minutes, circa 5000 steps in total and have climbed about 8 flights of stairs (sedentary office job).

Compared to

For reference, I am 186cm tall, 119kg heavy.

I have a hunch this may be somewhat related to heart rate - Garmin Connect is showing my resting heart rate as 73bpm, though when awake my resting heart rate is closer to 100 (bit of a known issue with high blood pressure/heart rate).
Could it be that with my elevated pulse being around 100, the vivoactive believes that I am exerting myself throughout the day when I'm in fact at rest?

0 Former Member over 7 years ago

I am at 175cm and 67kg, 48 ears old male, I am little bit stressed and offen both my fitbit Watch and my Garmin vivoactive Thinks I am doing training when I am resting at maybe 80 and above in puls. I do get to high calorie Reading and offen take away 400 calories or so to get it more accurate. I do weigh my self everyday with a Garmin scale and do put in all of my food via myfitnespal so I know my calorie intake. Here I get about 2100 calories burned a day http://scoobysworkshop.com/accurate-calorie-calculator/ but offen my Booth watches shows like 2500-2800 calories and if I eat so much calories I gain weight. So I Think my calorie reads are of due to stress.

0 Former Member over 7 years ago

Mines allways off by thousands of calories. I suspect due to high HRH and being a proper porker garmin just can't deal with it and gives insane calorie estimates. Activity calories are right but the all day stuff is seriously broken for me. I just ignore them.

0 Everdying over 7 years ago

ya, the all day stuff seems to be some algorithm to estimate calories burnt throughout the time of day...
what it uses i can only guess is its some combination of ur weight / age and the move bar / steps count.
cos even if u don't wear the watch, it still carries on calculating.
activity meanwhile is definitely heart rate based.

0 Former Member over 7 years ago

Hey everyone,

I'm not sure about the active calories, I never had any issues with that.

However, the resting calories are calculated incorrectly (around 20% too high).
I started talking to Garmin about it months ago, and I've been mosty ignored, but finally around 2 weeks ago I was promised that the issue has been elevated to someone who has the power to actually try and fix it, so hopefully all Garmin users will have proper calorie estimates soon ;)

Best regards

0 Former Member over 5 years ago

The calorie measurements are wildly random.

Some days it matches what the calorie counter of the treadmill says. Other days its 120 calories behind.

(same exercise, difficulty, pace and time duration)

Anyone else have this problem?

0 Former Member over 5 years ago

The calorie measurements are wildly random.

Some days it matches what the calorie counter of the treadmill says. Other days its 120 calories behind.

(same exercise, difficulty, pace and time duration)

Anyone else have this problem?

0 8393461 over 4 years ago

I just spent more than 200€ on a GARMIN watch against my Xiaomi band for 25 € and the calories calculation is completely inaccurate (ridiculous high). I read that it could be related to HR profile (haven't set any) and with my activity profile. But...explain me how other apps I am using can calculate it properly and GARMIN is not. Can anybody help me to set up my "correct profile" to get accurate calories counting (I burned x10 times more calories burned in resting mode than active mode, how can this be possible?). Thanks

0 2734966 over 3 years ago in reply to 8393461

Same here. I'm super disappointed with the metrics on this watch. Literally nothing it counts is even in a reasonably useful ballpark of accuracy other than mileage (which I think may be off too). Rip off.

0 hhasert over 3 years ago in reply to 8393461

https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=DJEru6ns626MZTh2kvUXZA

I think you mean the activity class. I do not think it is going to be a huge impact though. I have a vivoactive 3 music and for me the calories seem to be ok, I never trust the cheap bands since they are typically off. If you set gender, weight, age, length and activity class it should have the parameters it needs to calculate it. Comparing my crosstrainer with the watch it is very comparable with the watch about 2-5% lower than the calories burnt on the trainer based on resistance and speed.