These days, it seems like everything is being touched and altered by the technology wave. And when it comes to staying fit, the technology breakthrough’s have been no short of awesome. It used to be that the only way to count calories was to write down what you ate, consult your pocked-sized paperback calorie-counting book and whip out your handy-dandy calculator.
Those days are long gone, thanks to tiny computerized devices like the Fitbit Tracker, a 2-inch clip that fastens to your clothing and measures how many calories you are burning during the day. It even counts your caloric expenditure while you sleep. I don’t know about you, but I’m a bit intrigued by what my metabolism is up to while I snooze.
The FitBit is a wireless tracker that contains the same kind of motion sensors as the Wii Fit games. It measures your activity similar to a pedometer, but it also measures the intensity of your workouts or any other activity- saying walking to your car.
In a complex sequence of calculations that would befuddle our high school calculus teachers, the Fitbit immediately churns out our caloric burn. When you are within 25-50 feet of the Fitbit base station, your personal data will automatically sync to the FitBit website. From there, you can log what you ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner and see for yourself how well you did with keeping your calories under, or if it is remaining equal to your energy output.
One common thread that has been revealed to us through thousands of diet research studies is that keeping a food log is a surefire way to stay on top of your weight goals. The Fitbit takes the daily food diary one step further by also calculating how many calories you’ve burned in an hour or a complete day. It makes you 100% accountable for every step you walk and every bite of food that passes over your lips. And we all know that numbers don’t lie.
My only concern with the FitBit Tracker is the potential that monitoring your calorie input and output would become a mild obsession. The information is so immediately available that you might be interrupting meetings, waking up at 3:45 a.m. and moving in place in the line at the post office just to see how you’re doing. And I guess if you start planning your outfits around your new Fitbit accessory, then that might be a sign too to that you need to cool it a bit.
The Fitbit is a fun new gadget that can really serve as an educational tool for how our bodies process and metabolize energy. If you can’t seem to figure out why you aren’t losing weight, using a device like the Fitbit will help to shed some light on what it is that you’re doing or not doing to lose weight.
Here is the a complete review of the Fitbit Tracker.