FitBit – it is worth it?
Everyone always wants to lose weight or get fit by the end of the year. Unfortunately, it is not as easy as people think. The bottom line for losing weight is that you have a calorie deficit. That’s about it. Now, you might have heard about FitBit. It’s a wrist band that will track your activity while wearing it and can remind you to move as well as show you your progress of the day, such as steps, calories burned, heart rate and much more. It goes along with an app you download on your phone. It synchronizes over bluetooth so that you can see even more details about your day on the app. It is very useful to track your activity levels throughout the week, what hours you’re most active and how your heart rate and sleep is.
Why is is great to use when trying to lose weight? Because you don’t only see your activity but you want to reach specific bench marks and every day you might want to beat it again or even beat your activity from the day before. There are even challenges that you can do.
Also, you can track your food and water intake as well as your weight. (Even though we recommend not focusing too much on the scale just because if you’re doing some weight training you might gain muscles and muscles are heavier than fat. So you might not lose as much weight but you lose mass.)
Benefits
- It keeps you motivated because you want to see specific numbers and if you don’t reach them by let’s say 6PM, you’ll likely be motivated to go to the gym for a little or take your dog for an extra long walk.
- You can see how your heart rate varies throughout the day, which is pretty cool.
- Similarly, you can see what times during the day you burned how many calories.
- You can see how good your sleep was, how often you were awake or in deep sleep etc.
Why might I not want FitBit?
- Some people might not like sleeping with the wrist band or it might be uncomfortable and weird at first.
- If you really want to look at how active you are and also see the progress over weeks, you should keep it on as often as you can. If you only wear it every other day, there are a lot of steps, calories and other things missing. It also just doesn’t look at satisfying when you look at the graphs that compare the days.
- A lot of people actually use other apps for food tracking, such as Cronometer and MyFitnessPal.
Why use FitBit and not get an Apple Watch?
The Apple Watch can track your steps and heart rate etc. too. However, the Apple watch is meant for much more. FitBit is mainly focused on just your activity tracking. FitBit does have several different options to choose from and they look very different, too. FitBit is also of course cheaper than the Apple watch. It really depends what you want to have and use it for. If you have an Apple watch already, it might be fine just tracking with that then.
