Fitbit calorie tracking accuracy

Fitbit calorie tracking accuracy

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8bit

Original Poster:

5,003 posts

162 months

Friday 23rd February
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I have a Fitbit Sense 2 which I was mostly pretty happy with until recently. I started using the app to track food and drink intake to plot against calories burned, with a view to losing a little bit of weight. Been doing this for a few weeks now and generally my calories burned seems to exceed my intake by about 30-50%.

To me that should mean I should be starting to lose weight but I appreciate it may not be as simple as that? The other thing is, I'm not convinced the Fitbit accurately tracks calories burned. I go to the gym two or three times a week and swim at least once a week, plus walking a reasonable amount (usually just about 10k steps/day) but even on days where I'm largely sedentary it still thinks I'm burning 3000 calories sometimes.

I did some Googling and found some anecdotal evidence that this model in particular can very significantly over-estimate calorie burn but nothing to suggest there's much I can do other than ensuring all manual entries (e.g. weight, age etc.) are correct (they are) or switching to a different device. Anyone else here found the same issue and/or able to recommend a more accurate device? Prefer to stay with Fitbit if they have a better option but also open to other brands.