Unboxing the Fitbit

The Fitbit is a wonderful thing. It’s a pedometer on steroids which calculates calories burned, stories climbed, distance traveled and so on. While this in itself may not be cause for wonder the packaging, the ease of use and the great web app behind it makes it truly useful and inspiring.

The first contact you havewith any product is the packaging so this is always a decisive moment. Unlike those USB sticks you need a tomahawk warhead to open, the Fitbit is a breeze to get to.

The charger is elegant, the Fitbit pops right on and it will sync your data to the cloud whenever you’re in earshot of it. The armband you get for wearing it in the bed (it measures your sleep patterns) is super-comfortable, I had no trouble getting used to sleeping with it.

The thing that changes Fitbit from a fun gizmo to an actual useful tool is the amazing web app they’ve built. It records your device’s data but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. It is made in an extremely modular way so you can track anything you’d like. It already has tabs for tracking your weight, body fat, heart rate, glucose and so on, but you can add any other custom item into it, graphs and stats will be created for you. I get headaches quite often and I’m convinced it correlates with air pressure zones. With Fitbit I can log my headaches on a scale and see if I’m correct. If I’m not I can take a look if it has anything to do with my activity level, diet (I track my calorie intake) or any other activity.

Calorie tracking is also done in a very thought out way. Start typing in your food and select the closest match. Didn’t find what you were looking for? Just add it to your list. You can also add brands which makes it very easy to manage you stuff. You can also assemble meals out of specific foods so if you make lemon pie every week just create it once from the elements you need and then input “Lemon Pie” to track your intake.

Activities are also done with the same modularity in mind. Normally all your activities are tracked but in some cases this won’t be accurate. If you’re rowing or doing yoga or something you don’t move around all that much necessarily but you do burn calories. Simply choose a pre-made activity or enter the thing manually. I do EA Sports Active 2 exercises a lot where I get an exact measurement of my calorie burn which I can easily input into the system.

For me this modularity is what really makes Fitbit useful. I always stop using methods and gizmos because they aren’t all encompassing and I feel that if things are left out then I’m not getting a full picture. With Fitbit 99% of this is alleviated, giving me all the data I want to shift through and a great way to loose weight.