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The March Challenge in the iOS Activity app is making no sense. At the beginning of the month it started out telling me I needed 719 Calories a day. And my average at the start of the month was:

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(Never mind the fact that I'm in Australia and my local setting is kilojoules, and that it should localise like every other app in the world does. Has no trouble showing me activity in kilojoules but the challenge can't show kilojoules?)

Obviously that figure is wrong. First mysterious number right there. 20,263 kilojoules, would that even be possible?

I decided I wanted to get this badge so I converted the required daily average (719 calories) to kilojoules and got 3008.3. So I set the daily move goal to 3000 and planned to exceed it. And I have been, getting to around 4500 a day. So if I exceed the daily average goal the calculated average should be trending UP, right?

Not so. Now it tells me I am under the daily required average (today it reports 699) and the figure is trending down though I am still exceeding it by 50% a day and have been well above it all month.

Possible explanations I have considered....

  • the USA uses a different kind of calories from the rest of the world and my conversion of cal-kj is wrong (seems ridiculous but U.S. gallons are different to imperial gallons)
  • this challenge is as broken as February's
  • the decreasing daily figure shown is how much I would need to every day of the rest of the month? But then the ridiculously high figure from the start of the month makes no sense. -

So can anyone explain this?

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up vote 1 down vote

Your phone’s math looks off. I’d contact support in case they have a unit error in your locale. In the US I can confirm from three different people, we have pretty aggressive goals set. One person is far less active than me and far less calories on their goal. Another works out a lot more and has a much higher increase needed in their daily burn.

My goal was 25,015 calories and I’m barely going to make it tomorrow on the 29th having worked out at least once a day which is far more than I did all year.

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  • Sorry this isn’t an “answer” other than implying there is an algorithm that’s somewhat tiered or nuanced. Perhaps enough people could edit in their goals to crowd source a range of possible goals? – bmike♦ Mar 29 at 2:59
  • End of the months happened - I totalled the month and got over 800 calories per day. Something is wrong, so I am going to see what support says about it. Thanks for the advice. – Adam Eberbach Apr 3 at 11:19
  • @AdamEberbach Maybe there's an award for falling the most short from an impossible goal and you win the "lanterne rouge" for March 2018 – bmike♦ Apr 3 at 11:29

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