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Your smartwatch is lying to you about how many calories you burned, Study finds (news.fiu.edu)
submitted 14 hours ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1374232/your-smartwatch-is-lying-to-you-about-how-many-calories-you-burned-study-finds

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[–] 15 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

My exercise bike gives me a calorie count and apparently they are a bit better because the bike can actually measure how many watts of power you are generating which is the dream scenario for any calorie counting device. However even then they are only 80-85% accurate in counting calories because apparently we humans are all differently efficient in converting calories into watts. Despite this I still use that calorie number, but not to measure how many muffins I can now eat post workout, but just to compare my different workouts to each other. Recently I have been doing 1k kcal per day. Who knows maybe I'm efficient and it's actually 800kcal. But it gives me a goal to move towards each day.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 hours ago

    Even 80-85% sounds like too much.

    Compare the legs of a slim person with the legs of a severely overweight person. It's like adding shake weights onto the legs that do the pedalling.

    And overweight people have different weight distributions, some have the weight on the legs some in the belly. Depending on where the weight is, that's a massive difference.

    Watts input and watts output is massively different with every machine (compare e.g. an electric engine with 90+% efficiency to a combustion engine with maybe 20-30% efficiency), and humans are no different.

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