A week with the fitbit

I first heard about fitbit from a coworker who used it to track his daily running and activity. He showed it to me, and it’s a pedometer with a bit more – it wireless sync’s to a base station (laptop or desktop computer) and tracks your activity level as you wear it. It’s small and easy to tuck away – I’ve been wearing it under the color of my shirt, and it’s been pretty effective.

I had a previous pedometer (kept running out of battery), but I’m finding that after a week with the fitbit, the big difference is the dashboard that it automatically keeps and maintains. You can sign up for the dashboard even without having one – although without the fitbit what it really amounts to is an online journal for tracking food intake, weight, and the other kinds of common measurements. With the fitbit, and some of the data going in on a regular basis, it’s really become a bit more of a personal dashboard.

I’ve been trying to track food intake (i.e. calories) and weight manually. That’s going reasonably well, although I find it rather tricky to track calories for some of the food I eat – there isn’t an easy lookup. Ironically, getting breakfast at a health club cafe last weekend was the hardest – they couldn’t tell me anything about the nutritional value of what I ate. Ironic that it was a health club too…

The fitbit cost $99, and I frankly bought it on a whim because I saw other people saying great things about it. I wanted to check it – having liked having a pedometer before – and I’ve got to say, this particular gadget buy has really worked out. I’m now much more aware of how much I’m walking (and how much I’m not walking), and it’s even doing some numbers like “how many calories I’ve burned” so that making attempts to track how much I’m taking in with food have something nice to balance against.

I’m pretty happy with the first week – and I’d recommend it to anyone wanting to get a track on their day to day activity. Now we’ll see what happens after a few weeks…