Cronometer Reporting Inaccurate Garmin Daily Activity Calories
Cronometer is connected to my Garmin Connect account, and calorie tracking is being reported by a Venu 3.
I've been using Cronometer for about a month, and it has been accurately syncing data from Garmin up until yesterday (and now today).
Yesterday, I opened my Cronometer app to log some food entries, and I noticed that there was a significant jump in calories burned (~300kcal) since the last time I opened the app. I had not exercised or done any significant activity that should have caused that. The extra 300 calories burned was also not anywhere on the Venu 3 or in my Garmin Connect app. I was at around ~90kcal for "active calories" at that point in the day, and I'm not really sure what to make of that. The extra 300 calories burned were apparently over the course of around 25min or so, which would be pretty considerable cardio exercise or similar.
Today, the same thing is happening. My Venu 3 is reporting 36 "active calories" burned so far (9:34am), which matches my Garmin Connect info, but my Cronometer app has a "Daily Activity (Garmin)" entry for ~105kcal over a 4min duration.
What could be causing this? I love this app, which is why I'm going to open this ticket and try to resolve this. Things I have tried:
- Restarting Cronometer App
- Restarting Garmin Connect App
- Restarting Phone
- Restarting Venu 3
- Unlinking/relinking Garmin Connect/Cronometer
Any feedback is appreciated. Thanks!
- Joe
Comments
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Same issue for me, with the exact same Garmin tracker. Please investigate and update us with a fix.
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Same issue. It worked exactly as expected through Saturday 6/11
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Count me in as another who's having this issue. Beyond frustrating.
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It's not a bug, it's a feature:
https://support.cronometer.com/hc/en-us/articles/16957825757204-GarminDaily Activity from Garmin = Total burned - BMR - Individual Exercises.
It's a better representation of your actual daily activity than you were getting before since Garmin's use of RMR in their "resting calories" value is silently bundling hundreds of sedentary activity level calories in that weren't getting imported into Cronometer before so you had to set a "sedentary" activity level in Cronometer to account for them.
Ignoring those hundreds of sedentary calories is great for more rapid weight loss, but not so great for accurate tracking or if you're starving because of it.
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I'm afraid it still makes no sense.
My Garmin has: 1506 Resting
207 Active
= 1713 totalCronometer has: 1462 BMR
508 "Tracker Activity" from Garmin
= 1970 totalIf it is accounting for extra calories bundled into the Resting Calories, then why does Cronometer have 300 calories more, but there is only a difference of 44 calories between my Resting Calories on Garmin and my BMR on Cronometer? Should the "Active Calories" not then be 251 (207 + 44), not 508?
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This is a bug, and a big one as it really messes with calorie targets. The software is working very different from 2 days ago. See also reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/cronometer/comments/1dcygvg/cronometer_importing_way_too_many_calories_from/
Right now Cronometer reports -505 in daily activity calories, as well as two specific activities totaling -186.9 calories.
Garmin, in contrast, reports 368 "active" calories, which includes the BMR calories during the activities.
691.9 ≫ 368
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+1 to fixing this bug. My baseline activity in Crono has been set to Comatose and everything was working great until yesterday and it is still incorrect today.
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I made a table, for the last 10 days, of the difference between Garmin's total active calories and the total active calories imported by cronometer ("Exercise" + "Tracked Activity"). The results:
-395
-396
-11
-1
-2
0
-2
-2
-1
-1Until Monday 6/10 there was near perfect agreement. Then it has been off (crono is overcounting) by nearly the exact same amount per day. What is interesting about the two most recent days is that the exercise profile was quite different. Monday was a vigorous day burning a lot of calories and Tuesday was a couple of walks. Nonetheless, the error was consistent. Will see if that continues. If so, I can correct for it with a manual BMR input. It is nearly 20% of my BMR so I wonder if is somehow associated with the "sedentary" activity profile.
The minutes associated with the "Daily activity" import are also way off.
Anyone else want to chime in with what they see as the Δ between total active calories in Garmin and what Crono is importing?
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Unfortunately, I do not believe it is strictly associated with the "Sedentary" activity profile. My BMR is set to "Custom", and Baseline Activity Level "None".
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AnonJohn: That is what we should be seeing now. Before a few days ago they weren't importing those sedentary activity calories that are part of your Garmin RMR calculation, only the Garmin "active" calories minus any Garmin tracked active exercise calories. Take your BMR, multiply it by 20% and that number should be near to the additional calories you're seeing being imported. It probably won't be identical, but should be within a margin of error.
Garmin is just using a default Mifflin St. Jeor equation for calculating your BMR and multiplying that by that 20% to get your overall RMR (AKA "resting calories"). You accrue those calories throughout the day whether you're active or in a coma since Garmin doesn't offer a way to set a custom BMR or activity level to compensate. If anything we should be complaining to Garmin about not letting us adjust these values to reflect a custom BMR or activity level that matches our reality.
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I cut the lawn and suddenly had 782 extra calories to play with, I'm not sure what the complaint is, this is an amazing extra feature!
Fine, so I'm joking, but like others I have noticed that for the last 2 days the Garmin Connect imports are very different, Garmin's 408Kcal for the 11th imported as 782Kcal, 10th 48Kcal as 635Kcal, on the 9th and prior they were both the same.
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drsoran,
Not what I am seeing. My BMR is 1870 (based on a calculator I just looked up), so 1.2x that is 2244. I have the following numbers for the last several days, and I manually set cronometer to match what Garmin says for resting calories (I sometimes lag behind by a couple of days, hence my different values below, and also I don't weigh myself every day, which is why it doesn't move around):
Date Garmin Resting Garmin Active Garmin Total Crono Resting Crono Active Crono Total Delta
6/1/2024 2110 720 2830 2110 720 2830 0
6/2/2024 2106 218 2324 2110 218 2328 -4
6/3/2024 2106 569 2675 2110 569 2679 -4
6/4/2024 2106 727 2833 2110 728 2838 -5
6/5/2024 2106 1089 3195 2110 1090 3200 -5
6/6/2024 2106 747 2853 2110 748 2858 -5
6/7/2024 2106 452 2558 2110 453 2563 -5
6/8/2024 2106 950 3056 2110 950 3060 -4
6/9/2024 2080 1712 3792 2110 1712 3822 -30
6/10/2024 2080 176 2256 2110 592 2702 -446
6/11/2024 2080 662 2742 2080 1078 3158 -416You can see it's within margin of error up until 2 days ago, and then it goes way off. The "extra" calories are somehow 300+ what the difference between 1.2xBMR and the value Garmin reports. Crono seems to be adding something in the daily activity (my daily activity values in crono were 592 and 1078 for 6/10 and 6/11). Even for today (6/12), the value is currently at 225, from 16 minutes of activity. It was at 100 this morning, when I had just woken up. So the question: what in Garmin is sending this info, and how is crono interpreting it - there seems to be an issue there.
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Drsoran — I'm coming round to that point of view. If it's right, big shame on cronometer for making a significant (20+%!) change completely unannounced.
There are certainly issues with garmin's calcs. I remained baffled by whatever they are doing (what you wrote seems plausible). I think they do a nice job with activity calories estimates. But, for instance, they (mostly?) ignore the steps counted by the watch! Even worse the "steps" card reports total calories for some reason.
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I have moved to a new custom BMR target that is my old target -395 (or my old target -20%). This seems like it might work, but now creates a distinct oddity: The calories burned in my diary now shows, in addition to exercise, a fixed daily portion (the new BMR) + a portion that ticks up throughout the day when Garmin reports some low level of activity. Difficult to see the actual daily target since it is always moving. We'll see how this goes ...
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OK, I heard back from support, found a new FAQ, and can now explain how I have fixed things.
Reference: https://support.cronometer.com/hc/en-us/articles/360060308411-Energy-Burned
I recommend setting the "Baseline Activity Level" to "sedentary" (+.2*BMR). This is a change from how I used to do Garmin with "none".
I needed to then change my custom BMR to .8 * old BMR, such that "New BMR + New BMR * 0.2" = Old BMR.
By jumping through this hoop, something new shows up in "Calories Burned": "Adjusted baseline activity". This number starts off at 20% of BMR and counts down throughout the day as the offsetting baseline activity ("Tracker Activity") trickles in from Garmin. The net effect is that out can see a total calorie budget for the day, with "Burned" showing the projected total, including any specific exercises performed, and "Remaining" actually showing the remaining calories.
If you don't jump through the hoop, burned shows a weird combination "Day's total BMR" + Exercise performed + baseline activity performed so far during the day. This is weird because by including "Day's total BMR" you have some forward looking calorie budget while the rest is "up until now". So the calorie budget rises throughout the day in response to accrued base line activity.
Good luck everyone ...
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Is this really the fix we getting stuck with? It was working perfectly fine before and now I have to jump through hoops to get a similar result?
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@AnonJohn - What do you recommend if my BMR is updated daily based on my daily weight? before this happened automatically, but now,id have to manually change it every day?
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@road2fire That's my understanding and is accurate from my own observations:
For me to achieve a zero diff between what Garmin reports and what Cronometer reports, I have to take Garmin's resting calories and multiply by 0.8 and enter that manually into Cronometer. Doing that, I get a diff of exactly 0 calories. -
I also get 100% agreement when setting cronometer bmr to garmin 'rmr'*0.8 (but only on previous days). The great annoyance for me with the update is that since Cronometer has decided that they want to be the ones to calculate sedentary calories, not Garmin, your tracker contribution to 'resting' calories slowly increases over the course of the day, so you don't get a full estimate of calories burned for the day (i.e. your daily budget for meal planning) until the day is 100% complete.
Even if you e.g. set Cronometer's activity level to sedentary, any Garmin activity goes towards filling up that blue 'adjusted baseline activity' first, and your Cronometer budget will tick up with time to account for the ongoing difference between bmr and sedentary calories. I've noticed (simplified example) if the difference between your set bmr and sedentary calorie budget is exactly 400, then at 6 PM (i.e. 75% of the way through the day), your estimated daily calorie total is 100 lower than what it will be when the day is completed due to the 'topping off', assuming you've already filled up the adjusted baseline activity with Garmin active calories/activities.
While I can make the end of day numbers agree, the fact that the 'adjusted baseline activity' in Cronometer fills up inconsistently with time, and the final total keeps ticking up at a constant rate (in absence of unfilled 'adjusted baseline activity in Cronometer), makes this a bad update for me. I much preferred previously setting Cronometer's BMR to Garmin's RMR, because the end of day total would always be projected correctly and only increase with an increase in Garmin 'active' calories or an activity. As it stands I have to jump through hoops in my head when planning out my meals to figure out that I'll have somewhere between 1-200 extra calories to work with depending on what time of day it is.
If Cronometer would only fill the 'adjusted baseline activity' with the calculated difference between Garmin RMR and BMR multipled by percent of day passed, then things would probably work similar enough to before, but this does not seem to be the current behavior.
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Having the same issue, bad update in my opinion. +1 for fixing this
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Now that I understand what is happening, I've been happy enough to change my Cronometer BMR settings to comatose and just import from Garmin the daily activity.
Now obviously this activity level increases during the day, as it's dynamic by its very nature, so that's something to get used to. The difference is in reality that activity is now accurate and shown in arrears rather than being a guestimate shown in advance.
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@Cronometer please fix!
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@Arfski is it still working for you with that setting? Does cronometer and garmin agree at the end of the day?
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@silverbells Bearing in mind that they are reporting different things, the overall figures are in the right area. Garmin are using a Resting Metabolic Rate based on the much older Harris Benedict formula but Cronometer are using the Mifflin St Jeor equation for BMR. My (HB derived) RMR is 2850, my (MStJ derived) BMR is 2328, applying the broad multiplier for mildly active 2328 x 1.375 = 3201 kcal. Yesterday Garmin Connect suggested 3412 kcal for the day's total, with the Garmin activity import of 1134 kcal Cronometer suggested 3462 Kcal. That's all plenty close enough for me.
Edit: Garmin did, but they also now use Mifflin St Jeor equation after some googling! Probably why the figures are so close!
