Okay, the irony of using the FitBit doesn’t escape me at all.
I want to lose a few pounds, but I don’t want to think too hard while I do it. Lazy mindset, active body.
Maybe.
It’s be a tough year overall for me physically – every time I’d attempt to get back into some sort of physical regimen, I’d gork something up in my back and be out of commission for weeks.
It’s hard to get motivated when you know whatever you do is probably going to hurt you far past the “Feel the burn” concept.
And speaking of burning, I’ve had 7 nerves burned out on the left side of my spine – I think we got the two causing the most amount of trouble with this last pass, but it does seem to help – though I need to wait a few more weeks before we know for sure. (The nerves have to heal a bit more.) Overall, though, I can’t feel as much back there, so that’s good. (I have a couple of numb patches of skin as a result as well, but I can live with that.) The only thing I really have to watch out for is additional injury – if I can’t feel what’s going on back there…eh. There’s always a chance I’ll gork something up more and not realize it.
Anyway – back to the FitBit. It’s basically a device you wear – on your pocket (or in my case, I snap it right in the middle of my bra – it’s fairly unobtrusive there.) It’s part pedometer, but it also measures how many flights of stairs I go up, and how much sleep I get, how many calories I’ve burned, etc.
Even more awesome is that I don’t have to write it down anywhere. It wirelessly syncs to its charger base when I’m at home and pushes it up to the FitBit servers and keeps track of all that for me. And of course there’s an app for that too – I can enter what I’m eating or my weight or my fluid intake and all that without too much trouble. (If you want to get really crazy, you can upload your blood pressure or your glucose levels, which is nifty if you need to keep track of that too.)
But based on all that, it figures out my required calorie intake – how much I’ve eaten, how much more I can eat (you can put down if you want to lose weight and how quickly you want to do it.) But it’s also dynamic – my allowed number of calories recalculates the more I move around during the day. And it grows this little electronic flower, whee.
It may not always be 100% accurate with my steps, but as long as its consistently inaccurate, that’s fine. It’s really more for me to track patterns – and the sleep one is pretty nice. (You do have to tell it what time you went to bed and what time you get up on the app, but otherwise it knows how restless you are and how much actual sleep you get.
You can pay extra $$ and get additional reporting features on the website, but the basic ones are fine for me. Assuming I can keep up with it. 🙂
