health app calorie counts don’t add up

I appreciate that you're trying to help but I’m afraid that doesn’t make sense: there is no reason whatsoever to believe that this is because ‘the iPhone is recording the data correctly so we’ll want to focus the troubleshooting to the Apple Watch.’

I have tried to be very clear. The watch records my activity. It is strapped to me all day every day, my phone is not. Therefore the superset of data is gathered by the watch and it is the watch that I have moved to the top of the priorities list in the data gathering preferences. Not only that: the iPhone’s Health app/Move and Fitness app/Move are both, 100% of the time, showing exactly the same calorie data as the watch.

The discrepancy is between the Move calorie count (whether on watch, iPhone Fitness or iPhone Health apps) and the iPhone Health ‘Active Energy app. So this clearly has nothing whatsoever to do with the calibration of the watch.

It is fairly well known that the Health app is buggy. I have always found it so. For example mine has never been able to export health data - whatever generation of phone I’ve tried it on the process always hangs and I have to use a third party app.

So it would be quite good if Apple support, instead of responding to users with a problem on their many hundreds of £££ or $$$ worth of kit, didn’t get the usual generic ‘restart/reinstall/update’ kind of response and accepted that their might well be a bug that needs sorting. FYI my OSs are always up to date and I practice pretty high levels of digital hygiene.

I will leave it there.

In the iPhone Health App, calories expended are represented in two ways:

1) “Active Energy”

2) As “Move” calories, one of the three metrics shown in Activity, which itself seems to mirror the data presented in the Fitness app on the phone.

The problem I have is that on my watch, at the end of each day, I have a day’s total calories expended which is shown in the Activity complication.

So let’s identify these four measure of what should be the same thing as follows:

A) Phone/Health App/Active Energy

B) Phone/Health App/Move

C) Phone/Fitness App/Move

D) Watch/Activity Complication/Kcal segment

Now here is a good example taken from Saturday 28th Feb of the values shown at a second before midnight and therefore now recorded as the total Kcal date for that day:

A) 1,023 Kcal

B) 1,158 Kcal

C) 1,158 Kcal

D 1,158 Kcal

As it happens I use the iPhone Health App’s Active energy (“A” above) as my long term way of looking at how my performance is developing. I do this because it shows the best and largest graphs of that data. But it is the one place where calorie expenditure keeps not being recorded. As you can see above, measure B,C and D all agree that I expended 1,158 Kcal that day but measure A ‘stole’ 135 Kcal which, in a short month like February, reduces daily average by 5 kcal alone. Given that this same problem manifests on many but not quite most days, my monthly averages suffer more significantly. As I say though, on most days, ABC&D show the same value. This is certainly NOT a confusion between active and resting calories or a problem in resolving them in total calories.

For example these are the February averages shown in the above places in the iPhone health app

A) 1,171

B) 1,181

The iPhone Fitness app and the Apple Watch do not display monthly averages so there are no values for C or D. There is a bug of some kind which is interfering with the way that active calories burned above basal metabolic are added up in the “A” measure.

As I say it is rather disheartening when one is being encouraged to set and break targets for exercise and then this bug removes some of the effort I‘ve made from my totals!

BTW the only place I can find where Active versus Resting calories is displayed is in the summaries of each workout shown in the iPhone Fitness App, which shows Active and Total Kcal used in each workout. The difference between these two is far, far greater than much smaller miscounts which are common between A and B,C&D.

It really is a bug.

Yeah. Not reading at all what I wrote is not helpful however polite your tone. Anyone with a reading age over about five can see from all of the above that the watch is not the problem. It is 100% clear.

Please, if you want to help, do. If you want to cover @ss or be a lazy if well-meaning participant, don’t.

It might feel to you as if you are being helpful but you are not. You are in fact being passive aggressive.