If you've been following my goal setting posts you know that my Health and Fitness Goals include completing Michelle Bridges 12 Week Body Transformation (12WBT), learning to run, eating more nutritiously and losing some weight. By completing the 12WBT I am combining these four goals together. The 12 WBT began on Monday 1st of Feb. It's only 3 days in but today when I jumped on the scales I've already lost 1.4kg. Must celebrate the small stuff! Anyway, now on to today's actual top. To celebrate starting the 12WBT I bought myself a Fitbit! (finally....)
Plum Perfection
The store where I bought my Fitbit had 3 colours - plum, blue and orange. So of course I had to get plum, being the closest to pink available. The actual display is pink so I'm super happy about that. I've been using it since Sunday ( I bought it Saturday and left it to charge over night) and today is the first day I've had to charge it so it lasted me roughly 4 days. Let me tell you more about it! Oh I should probably take a moment to tell you I'm not affiliated with Fitbit or anything else mentioned or linked to in this blog. I just love it! |
Functions!
The chargeHR has some awesome features which include:
- Heart Rate Monitoring (good for tracking activity!)
- Sleep Monitoring! (now I can prove that I sleep badly!)
- Counts the steps you take
- Lists how many floors/stairs you walk
- Displays how many calories you've burned
- Tracks the distance you've traveled
- Displays the time
- Let's you set a silent alarm (vibrates)
- and probably a heap of other stuff I haven't figured out yet!
The App!
Your Fitbit connects to an app either on your iPad, iPhone, 'leading android devices' or on your Mac or Windows Vista or later. The app syncs wirelessly with your Fitbit and allows you to view more in depth information about the data your Fitbit is tracking. It's functions include:
You can download this app and use it to take your food, water and some other stuff even if you don't have a Fitbit!
Below are some pictures from the app.
- Detailed graphs showing your daily and weekly stats in all areas listed in the Fitbit's functions above
- Allows you to track your Food by searching through it's data base or custom entries
- Allows you to track your water intake
- Allows you to input goals - your Fitbit will let you know when you've reached them
- Allows you to find other apps that Fitbit is compatible with like MyFitnessPal, RunKeeper and the 12WBT app!
- Allows you to adjust some of the settings like what is displayed when you tap it or when you press the button the first time.
- Tracks your weight!
- and probably some other stuff...
You can download this app and use it to take your food, water and some other stuff even if you don't have a Fitbit!
Below are some pictures from the app.
Challenger Up!
One more thing you can do on the app is to challenge your friends! Or challenge yourself! Whenever you meet one of these challenges you will get an email with a nice shiny graphic (see below) that lets you know! It can be a lot of fun to challenge your friends, especially if they have similar goals for being active to you. By challenging yourself you can work on beating your Personal Best everyday! |
Accessorize!
I hope you weren't thinking that once you bought your Fitbit you were stuck with the same colour forever! You can buy extra bands to match your wardrobe! And if your either very creative or willing to spend the extra money you can create or by your own customized bands or even just add bling! |
How Perfect is Perfect?
So today I decided to try and test out the accuracy of the steps tracker by counting my steps this morning on the way home from dropping off the kids. The current steps was at 8,100 (which I thought was slightly ridiculously high for 8am but I did go for a walk/run as exercise this morning so...) and I counted to 1,000 steps along the way home and then counted a further 100 just in case because I was walking at (my) normal pace and not being overly accurate (I can walk faster than I can count sometimes!). I then check the steps again and it was at 8,900 (roughly). That's roughly 200 less than my count. So I did some Googling and found this helpful article that explained that I don't long (distance) enough steps because my legs are short...
Another thing to take note of is that the active minutes tracker really only tracks minutes where you are doing an exercise that involves a lot of movement (distance / cardio). Today and Monday are the only two days that I've managed to reach my 'active 30 minutes' however yesterday I did 45 or so minutes of strength training - it only counted 26 of those minutes as 'active'.
Finally, I watched a review on YouTube today where the guy explained that he used the Fitbit and another device which lead him to the belief that Fitbit's heart rate tracking was not as accurate. So if you really are into the heart rate monitoring only and not all the other functions this is probably not the device for you.
Another thing to take note of is that the active minutes tracker really only tracks minutes where you are doing an exercise that involves a lot of movement (distance / cardio). Today and Monday are the only two days that I've managed to reach my 'active 30 minutes' however yesterday I did 45 or so minutes of strength training - it only counted 26 of those minutes as 'active'.
Finally, I watched a review on YouTube today where the guy explained that he used the Fitbit and another device which lead him to the belief that Fitbit's heart rate tracking was not as accurate. So if you really are into the heart rate monitoring only and not all the other functions this is probably not the device for you.
Why I still Love My Fitbit!
So despite the above inaccuracies I still love my Fitbit because. It will always be inaccurate which makes it quite accurate for tracking improvements! I bought the Fitbit for all the other functions and the heart rate monitoring is kind of just a bonus. Personal Bests are more of what I'm interested in and seems it will always track the same I can use it to track those! |
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Bye for Now!