The FitBit. It’s tiny, it’s beyond portable, and it tracks how active (or inactive) you are. I bought this little guy after seeing various bloggers around the web falling in love with theirs, and I had to get in on the action. What made it so appealing?
The answer to that comes with the territory of the crowd I was following: techies. We inherently love numbers. Indisputable numbers is a quick and dirty way to compare things, and the FitBit caters to our love to a letter. It tracks the number of steps taken, miles travelled, number of calories burned, and the flights of stairs walked for the current day. Best of all, all of those metrics are immediately available for consumption on the device. However, the site is where the real depth comes in with sleep effectiveness, calories taken in, and a 30-day graph of the previously mention bits of data. After a few weeks of use, you can really get a sense of where you are on the scale of daily activeness.
Although the numbers are a fantastic way to monitor progress, that goes the other way and it’s easy to see regression, for better or worse. If you don’t cheat the system, you’ll see exactly when you took fewer steps in one day, or took in significantly more calories than you burned. And that’s the best motivation for anyone trying to get fit. But that requires a lifestyle change.
The downside to owning a FitBit, at least for the first week or so, is remembering to actually incorporate it into your daily routine. As you can see from the picture I provided, there were more than a few occasions when I completely forgot to track the foods I ate. Once or twice, I left it on my desk or in another pair of jeans.
At $100, it’s a rather steep entry price for what is essentially a pedometer on steroids. Yes, this pedometer does have wireless syncing, altimeter for tracking stairs climbed, and says adorable things like “Hug me,” but it’s still $100. That being said, I can’t really say that I don’t like it. Heck, I love my FitBit.
PS – And for those wondering, I get around 4.9 hours of sleep each night.
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