Google Health Connect distinguishes between two calorie values: "Active calories burned" (movement only) and "Total calories burned" (movement plus resting metabolism). Which app writes which value is up to the respective provider — some apps write only active calories, some only total calories, some both. Fddb has no influence on where the data ends up or whether it is correct. To rate your activities as accurately as possible anyway, the Fddb app automatically selects the most suitable available value. This article explains how that works and where you can look up the values in Google Health Connect yourself.
The Google Health Connect integration is only available in the Fddb Android app from the Google Play Store; it requires an Fddb Premium membership.
Where do the calories of an activity come from?
For every workout an app writes to Google Health Connect, Fddb looks for the calories in this order:
- Active calories of the recording app for exactly the time window of the workout.
- Total calories of the same app for that time window.
- Calories from other apps covering the same time window — for example, when your tracker app recorded the workout but a different app wrote the calories. If several apps write values for the same workout, they are not added up; the highest value is used — that counts as a workout reported twice, not as calories burned twice.
- If no value can be found at all, the activity gets no calories — a missing value is more accurate than an invented one.
Active calories take priority over total calories because total calories also include your resting metabolism during the workout — and Fddb already accounts for that in your daily requirement. It would be counted twice.
Steps outside of workouts
Steps that fall within a workout are assigned to that workout, so a run doesn't count twice, for example. For the remaining steps of the day, Fddb looks for the calories in this order:
- Active daily calories from your tracker app. If the app wrote its own daily value to Google Health Connect, Fddb uses that value — so the daily row matches what your tracker app shows.
- Estimate from distance and body weight. Without a daily value, Fddb estimates the walking calories from the remaining distance: 0.5 kcal per kilogram of body weight and kilometer — the additional cost of walking on top of your resting metabolism. If no weight is stored in Fddb, Fddb uses 70 kg.
- Estimate from steps. Only if your tracker app measured no distance at all, Fddb falls back to 0.04 kcal per step.
The estimate is identical to the one in the Fddb iOS app with Apple Health — both platforms assign the same value for the same day. Log your weight in Fddb regularly: it makes the estimate more accurate.
How the data appears in your diary
In your diary you'll see one row per day for each app that wrote steps or workouts to Google Health Connect. The row carries the name of the respective app, not "Health Connect" — so you can tell right away which source a value comes from. The rows only appear when the "Import activity calories" switch is enabled in the tracker settings ("Account" tab → "Tracker & Apps" → "Health Connect").
Where you can look up the values in Google Health Connect
If you want to trace a value shown in Fddb, you can check in the Google Health Connect app what the individual apps actually wrote:
- Open the Health Connect app on your Android device (on newer Android versions it is also available in the system settings under "Security and privacy").
- Open the section with your data (depending on the version, "Data and access" or "Your data") and select the "Activity" category.
- There you'll find the entries "Active calories burned" and "Total calories burned" — each with the individual records and the app that wrote them.
The exact labels may change with updates of the Health Connect app — it comes from Google, not from Fddb.
Important: Values you enter or correct by hand directly in Google Health Connect are not imported by Fddb. Fddb only takes over data written by tracker apps. Data that Fddb itself exported to Google Health Connect is not read back in either — otherwise logged activities would come back twice.
Why do the values sometimes differ from what Health Connect shows?
Fddb reads the individual records and assigns them itself instead of taking over the daily totals from Google Health Connect — those group values differently at day boundaries. Small differences between what Health Connect shows and what Fddb shows are therefore normal.
Providers also behave differently: some apps write only total calories per workout (Google Fit, for example), others only active calories (Oura or the Zepp app, for example). Some also deliver individual values with a delay, only after the next sync of the manufacturer's app. In every case, Fddb automatically selects the most suitable available value.
Also note: if you connect Fddb with more than one app, calories burned may be counted twice. In that case, check your connections under "Tracker & Apps".