In November of last year I was invited to a good friends wedding which is happening next month and have been trying to lose a little bit of weight since January through a combination of healthy eating and exercise. Although there have been a few minor blips, I feel like I am generally doing quite well. As a bit of a techie, I have also felt the need to digitise my efforts. Despite the fact that wearable fitness trackers and digital scales have been getting bad press in the last few months, I am here to sing their praises and extol their virtues.
As part of my Christmas stocking, Santa brought me a fitness tracker and a digital body weighing scales. Both of these devices connect up to smartphone apps to help you to monitor your progress. The tracker even “awards” you with electronic badges and milestones when you meet pre-set targets. I have recently been told that I have walked the width of England and more since starting wearing the device on New Year’s Day, which is about 5 miles a day, 7 days a week!
I wear the tracker all of the time and it measures a variety of different things. As well as telling me how many steps I have done, it also monitors my heart rate and how many flights of stairs I have climbed. Based on my exercise levels and current health, it also estimates how many calories I have burned over the course of the day. It even tells me how long I have been asleep for! If I wanted to, I could even input my food data into the app to help to track calories in, compared to calories out. I haven’t been doing that yet, because it does take a lot of time to break everything down into individual components. However, I still feel as though I am getting a lot of relevant information out of the app. The tracker encourages you to try to reach 10,000 steps over the course of the day, and I do feel inclined to walk that extra bit to reach my daily goal. The tracker even gives a little vibration to warn me when I have been sitting still for too long!
My smart weighing scale also offers loads of useful functionality. As well as telling me my body mass, the scale uses electrical pulses to calculate how much of my body is fat, water and muscle. Since January, I have been gradually reducing the fat percentage and increasing the muscle percentage. The scales also send all of this information to an app, so that I can track my progress. I find this much easier than using a standard body weighing scale, because I don’t have to remember all of the figures in my head. My mind would constantly play tricks on me with my old scales, so I would think that I had lost or gained more than I actually had.
Although the two devices are not made by the same company, I have been able to link both of the apps together with one another. This means that they both share data with each other to increase their functionality even further!