The Fitbit was the ideal Christmas present for me – thanks to my big brother, Nolan. Mostly because it’s something that I never thought I would need, or buy myself, but it has actually been a gadget that I have really benefitted from.
The Fitbit is an activity tracker that you wear all day on your wrist, it records how active you have been in terms of steps taken, how long you have worked out for and how many calories you have burned.
It is not made to look like a piece of jewellery and it has a really simple style. It’s comfortable and easy to forget that you are wearing it…however it is waterproof so if you forget to take it off in the shower it’s not a big deal.
The battery life is great, as I have only charged it a couple of times in the two months that I have been using it, and a massive plus is that you get sent an email notification when the battery is low – fantastic for someone as forgetful as me!
You should have no difficulties using the Fitbit application, even if you are a bit of a technophobe – opening the box is probably the hardest part. You need to charge the Flex before you start using it but it then fits snugly into the wristband, and then you can just go about your usual business safe in the knowledge that every step you take will be tracked and logged.
The only downside may be that the Fitbit Flex has no built-in display but for me that isn’t a problem, I prefer to check my stats at the end of the day and it is also easy to track on the go through the mobile and tablet apps. It’s easy to create a Fitbit account, where you access all your data. You just need to enter your personal details to start such as gender, height, weight and then you can customise your dashboard page to display the information that’s most important to you. You can set daily goals such as number of steps taken, calories burned, distanced walked etc and if you find the default levels are too easy or too challenging you can reset them.
To encourage and motivate you the Fitbit awards you ‘badges’ to represent achievements. It may seem silly but I do find it motivating to get an email notification congratulating me for earning a badge due to the number of steps taken and so on.
You can also use the Fitbit to monitor your diet which is especially useful if you are looking to lose weight. You can easily scan in what you eat using product barcodes – the food database built into the app is American, but you can manually enter any food that you can’t find in the database. I haven’t tried it yet but you can also sync the Fitbit app with My Fitness Pal which has a brilliant database.
What I like most about the Fitbit is that it makes me think about how active I am on a day-to-day basis, not just when I’m training. There is a massive difference between days that I am training and just busy being out and about and those days where I am literally home-car-office-car-home. It really forces more self-awareness upon you and I think that can only be a good thing. It puts me in a better position to make decisions for example on what to have for dinner that evening or how much I need to work out the next day. As they say, knowledge is power, and that is exactly what for me, the Fitbit provides.