So, it’s been just over a year since I got my Fitbit. Yes, I’m one of those assholes who obsesses over their ‘step count’ and will happily walk in circles round the bedroom to nudge themselves over their 10,000 step daily goal before going to bed, if needs be. One of those assholes who used to really annoy me before I became one of them.
I only really got a Fitbit (Blaze) in the first place because my GF had one, and would insist on showing me the chart generated by the sleep tracking feature to prove just how badly she had slept. I usually feel as though I haven’t slept well either, but when you wake up tired every day, it’s difficult to do any kind of day-on-day comparable analysis, so I thought that if I had the same thing myself I could show her she’s not alone, and maybe garner a bit of sympathy for my own poor sleep to boot. Unfortunately, this didn’t really work out too well, as whereas the GF’s sleep chart was a constant rash of light blue lines showing ‘restless’ periods, my sleep chart is typically a nice, solid dark blue block showing uninterrupted sleep. That, coupled with Fitbit handily pointing out my “time to fall asleep: 1 minute”, and I am not getting (or deserving) any sympathy whatsoever.
But since getting my Fitbit, it has absolutely ‘encouraged’ me to get more exercise, and in the past year I’ve lost a good 5 lb (initially I lost 10 lb, but that was a bit unhealthy so I proactively put 5 lbs back on), although most of this ‘exercise’ has actually just been walking. I don’t run too much now, because my knees can’t take it, and I had to give up squash as there are no squash courts left round here, so I’ve been left with walking. Which I’ve been doing a lot. Most days I try to get out for a post-lunch walk, or I’ll walk round a nearby park in the evening. I even bought a cheap treadmill so that I could get my walk on even when it was raining (yes, I am made of sugar, and yes I will melt!), but now I find I’m using the treadmill in preference to actually going outside. Partly because it’s so damn hot outside (this is Texas…), but if I’m honest, it is mainly because I made a deal with myself that I could only start watching a new series on TV if I watched it while on the treadmill. So far I have walked my way through three seasons of Orange Is The New Black, Making of a Killer, the first season of Better Call Saul, and have just started Game of Thrones (I’m two episodes in and have yet to remember a single character’s name apart from Sean Bean, who I think is played by Liam Neeson. Or the other way round – it’s all so confusing. And yes, I’m also becoming one of those assholes who sticks their fingers in their ears and starts reciting “lalalalala” really loudly whenever anyone mentions Game of Thrones, in case I accidentally hear a spoiler…). But if I set the speed to a steady 4.6 mph I get in over 5,000 steps per episode, which is pretty decent. And before you argue that walking isn’t really exercise (as I used to tell my GF), by the time I have finished an hour on the treadmill I am sweating like a hooker in church, and regularly manage lose a whole Lb in the process (which I then put straight back on in water when I rehydrate, but still…).
Either way, my Fitbit tells me that I have ‘walked’ just over 4.5 million steps in the year that I’ve had it, which is some 2,500 miles. This sounds like a lot, but just everyday walking around counts – hell, I can get 20 steps in just by getting up in the night to go pee, and I’d hardly consider that ‘exercise’ (maybe if I was trying to pass a kidney stone it would be…). The downside to this method of measurement is that I tend to see distances in steps, now. My GF asked me how far it was to a friend’s house, and without a pause, I replied “Oh, about 2,000 steps…”. But in my defense, it’s good that I now know this, as it shows that I tend to walk it rather than drive it, now.
But beyond just measuring your steps (and evaluating your sleep), Fitbit do deserve credit for continuing to introduce new ‘features’ into their app. Actually, most of them aren’t really features, but rather new ways of nagging you about not getting enough exercise (which, really, is the main point of having a Fitbit). It used to just tell you the number of ‘active’ minutes you had in a day – defined as ‘anything above a brisk walk’, with a target of 30 minutes per day – which was fine; I get at least that anyway, thanks to having three kids to chase. But a while back they introduced an ‘active days’ feature, where you are encouraged to exercise (by default) at least 5 out of 7 days in a week. Which is a little bit of a stretch some weeks, as some days work just gets in the way. But then recently they came up with another shaming tactic – hourly activity. With this, they track the number of hours in your day where you get at least 250 steps. You can choose your hour range, but this only accepts up to 14 hours, but I’m usually up for 18 hours in any given day, and I don’t like not getting credit for steps or ‘active hours’ I’ve put in (hell, I feel cheated if I’ve forgotten to put my Fibtit back on when I get out of the shower, and I miss getting credit for walking the 50 steps to the kitchen and back before I remember to put it on). Hitting 250 steps in an hour sounds simple enough (250 steps is really very little) but it’s actually pretty hard to hit consistently during the work day, when I’m generally just sat at my desk working, and the frequency with which I get up and walk anywhere is directly related to the capacity of my bladder (which seems to be about one large coffee and two hours). One of the metrics that the Fitbit app pumps out based on this measurement is the ‘longest stationary period’, which has informed me that on a typical workday morning, I will apparently sit at my desk without moving for a good couple of hours at a time (and no, I’m not asleep – the work-mandated RSI Guard proves that at least my fingers are moving…).
That said, although the Fitbit app is useful (well, maybe interesting, more than actually useful) in the information it gives you, I’d really like to see some better reporting coming out of it. The individual metrics (steps, heart-rate, sleep, calorie consumption, and so on) are all well and good, but Fitbit is missing the ability to generate reports that combine these metrics. Maybe it’s just because of my increased use of ‘analytics’ (what used to just be called ‘number-crunching’) at work, and the prevalence of customizable ‘reporting dashboards’, but I’d like to be able to chart my step count against my sleep hours for a month, to see if there is any correlation between exercise during the day and the quality of sleep that night, or chart my heart rate against my sleep for a night to see just how deep a sleep I’m really getting. Maybe this will come, but until Fitbit starts providing actionable data, it’s likely to remain a curio, and just another source of competition between myself and the GF – typically over who is getting the worst sleep (invariably, her). Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go walk somewhere (anywhere..) before the top of the hour, before my Fitbit chides me for sitting on my ass for too long…
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