OCD Dream Gear: The Fitbit

Three FitBits, all in a row.

Adorable, isn’t it? I have to admit, the form factor was a big part of the attraction.

In some ways, the Fitbit is a really fancy pedometer. It has an accelerometer in it, much like what you’d find in a wii controller. It is particularly suited for walking, running, hiking, jogging, and sitting still. (Yes, knowing how much time you spend sitting on your butt is actually useful). It can also track your sleep to some extent; I’ll talk about that in another post.

The form factor and the online interface were the real selling points for me. The fitbit is sleek and subtle. It’s built like a belt clip, but because of how small it is, I can wear it on my bra. Which is mostly where I wear it.

I already knew that I was pretty sedentary, but the fitbit visually presented that information in a way that motivated me to get off my butt and move around more, which means it’s doing its job as a fitness aid.

Here we have an overview of my typical workday after using the fitbit for several months. Each colored line indicates calorie burn, which indicates activity. You can see a few spikes during the night, which indicate times I moved around a lot or got out of bed. Then, you can see some pretty consistent blue activity (blue meaning low level) as I started my day. The big orange and red spikes indicate my lunch time walk, when I was more active and therefore burning more calories. It’s a very simple, and therefore very useful, visual.

Above the graph, you can also see how many calories I burned (logged by the fitbit itself ) and how many I ate (logged manually by me). Again, very useful. I don’t actually manually log every single thing I eat on the fitbit site. The interface is a little cumbersome for me, and it requires me to remember and enter whatever I ate the next time I’m near my computer. I use LoseIt on my iPhone throughout the day and then just enter the summary of my calories  into fitbit’s interface in the evening.

Activity Log, complete with pie chart!

There’s also an activity log that records the number of steps and miles and shows you the same info as above in pie chart form. Useful, but I like the graph from above better. (Click to enlarge if you’d like to see it more clearly).

If you participate in an activity the fitbit isn’t good at logging, like weight lifting, you can add that manually and the software will provide a “standard” calorie burn for that.

Intake vs Burn. My other favorite graph.

I’m not sure this graph even requires any explanation. It’s just lovely. You can see where I didn’t track food intake. You can see where I ate more than I burned. You can see where I burned more than I ate. You can see my average intake and my average burn. This is awesome information. Particularly when matched up against weight fluctuations.

BMI fluctuations over the past month.

That huge intake spike around March 12th was when we took J’s dad out to dinner at our favorite steakhouse; primerib and a baked potato seriously add up.

There are a bunch of other graphs, all of them with useful info. These are the ones I find most helpful. I love that I can see patterns over the last month, or over the last year (once I’ve been tracking that long). I love that I can see the correlation between my exercise, my consumption, and my weight.

I love my fitbit. The information is useful, the step count is pretty accurate, and the physical object itself is unobtrusive and convenient to wear.