On a whim, I bought a Fitbit four months ago. You might be thinking that $100 is a lot to pay for a pedometer. And it is. But it’s so much more than a pedometer.
In the past, I bought several cheap pedometers. Cheap as in less than $10. They seemed to accurately count my steps, but I ended up losing two or three of them. But that’s not really the pedometers’ faults, that’s mine for being careless. The thing about the cheap pedometers is that there’s no automatic recording. So at the end of the day, I’d look at my pedometer, see that I only walked 5000 steps, think to myself that I should walk more, and then just forget about it the next day. Sure, I could have recorded the number of steps I took every day myself, but that’s such a pain. And who wants to do that on vacation?
So I got this Fitbit. It keeps track of the number of steps you take, and it automatically resets at midnight every day. Not only that, but it also uploads your stats to the Fitbit website through the wireless base station it comes with. You don’t even have to stick the Fitbit onto the base station, since it’s wireless. So as long as you get within a few feet of your computer, the data automatically gets recorded. If you go to the website, you can see how many steps you’ve taken each day for the past few weeks, and it plots it in a nice, readable way. It even gives you a breakdown of what times during the day you were most active, at least in terms of number of steps.
Another cool feature is the sleep tracking. It comes with this little wrist strap you can wear at night, and you just stick your Fitbit into the strap and it records when you were awakened during the night, so that it can track how many times each night you were awakened, and how long you were actually asleep. The downside, though, is that you have to remember to put this wrist strap on every night, and it also doesn’t automatically detect when you get into and out of bed, so you have to remember to hit the button on the Fitbit itself when you get into bed, and then hit it again when you get out of bed. If you mess up, you can enter the times manually on the website, but it’d be nice if the Fitbit, with all of its advanced sensors, could detect when you were lying down in bed and when you got up.
You can also enter your weight on the website, and it’ll keep track of your weight history and graph it for you. If you have a Withings scale, it’ll even automatically get the weight from the scale for you! It makes me wish I had one. Maybe I’ll impulse purchase one of those scales some day. Well, I guess it wouldn’t be an impulse purchase if I just mentioned it…
There’s so much more on the website that I haven’t taken advantage of, like tracking the food you eat and calculating your calorie intake. I really don’t want to know how many calories I eat from all that unhealthy food I eat, so I avoid that feature out of fear. And laziness. You can also track your activities, like if you go on a bike ride or something, so that you have a record of when you did what and for how long. But me? Do physical activities? Not so much.
So far, I think the Fitbit has been worth it. I’ve had some close calls where I almost lost it, but somehow, the clip is sturdy enough so that it doesn’t easily fall out, and when the Fitbit is directly on my waistband, it doesn’t seem to go anywhere. I feel more motivated to have fewer lazy days, and more days of 10,000+ steps. Of course, I’m still gaining weight, but that’s just from overeating…