Got a FitBit - It's working for me, here's my feedback (now with pictures).

I don't think the fitbit is the main thing here in this scenario, it's your dedication.

The fitbit is just doing the simple things for you like calorie counting and tracking activity. Both of which I do using food labels and readings on the treadmill, etc.

Most fatties just never have the dedication or the will to succeed in losing weight. They will go on a "diet" or join the gym but only go for a month or two then give up or continue eating excessively so their exercise makes little difference.

This has helped your diet by counting calories for you (both what you are eating through myfitnesspal and by what you have burned through fitbit).

Both of these things could have been done by yourself, so it's no magical "cure". Your doing the hard part yourself, sticking to it. Basically you have changed your lifestyle before you did nothing now you walk for several hours a day. It's this that is the most important part you have changed your lifestyle most fatties only do it temporarily when they try and lose weight then fall back into their old life.

This is why the fitbit gets a bad rep, it does nothing you cant do yourself quite easily. The hardest part is becoming and staying more active until you reach your goal. Once you reach your goal weight you don't really need to walk anymore so long as you keep calories at maintenance level.

Usually people who buy fad items like fitbit are ones who are looking for a quick fix, people looking for the easy option are the ones who are the most likely not to succeed, obviously there are exceptions to this as you have proven.

But anyone looking at the fitbit as a quick fix or easy solution to a big problem then they are going to be disappointed, the biggest factor is the person, their will, dedication and how bad they want to be fitter.

So Feek you have done marvelously well keep it up, your putting too much praise on the fitbit, it's just a automatic calculator. It's you that has done the hard part all it did was some basic calculations I do all the time in my head on a daily basis.
 
An incredible achievement Feek.
Picked up a Fitbit flex after reading this thread, to make it easy to see how much walking I do at work, so cant go Oh I've walked enough today. Now I will now if I have or haven't. Just seems it will make live easier and won't try double guessing myself to avoid doing stuff when I get back from work.

Although such trackers still seem to be extremely basic and just pedometers.
Is it really that hard to include skin temp and wrist heart beat monitor to make them far more accurate.
 
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Glaucus said:
An incredible achievement Feek.
Picked up a Fitbit flex after reading this thread, to make it easy to see how much walking I do at work, so cant go Oh I've walked enough today. Now I will now if I have or haven't. Just seems it will make live easier and won't try double guessing myself to avoid doing stuff when I get back from work.

Although such trackers still seem to be extremely basic and just pedometers.
Is it really that hard to include skin temp and wrist heart beat monitor to make them far more accurate.
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There is no such thing as a wrist heart rate monitor.

I have a heart rate monitor and it's made by the top HRM company in the world Polar and it requires a chest strap to work in fact all their models do.

So yes it is hard to do, nobody has done it yet and I imagine if you managed to make an accurate one for cheap you could become a millionaire from the patent.

I bought a HRM for cardio (running) and to do heart rate training.

Like I have said above this is simply a tool for measuring activity in regards to walking, sleeping, etc and doing some guesswork to calorie count for you. If your not interested in calorie counting then you could simply just buy a pedometer instead of a fitbit and save yourself some cash.
 
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Of course its just a tracking tool, no one thinks it's some magical device.

There's several watches which measure heart rate without a chest strap.
 
You may as well use your smartphone camera if your going to go into the whole wrist only HRM debate, it's most likely going to be just as accurate as a wrist only device.

Or you may as well just use an educated guess using your weight, height, age, sex and activity level to say how many calories you burned as that will be roughly as accurate as well as a wrist only device.

That's why HRM's use chest straps because accuracy is key to knowing exactly how much you burned. That is why fit bit doesn't come with a wrist only HRM it would make zero difference to the accuracy of it and would cost a lot more to make i imagine.

chest strap = accurate data

any other way isn't going to make the data any more accurate than it currently is i imagine, because they will be taking your personal info into account when calculating.

you may as well just use calculated guesswork instead of a wrist only version which is what fit bit actually does for you.


if Polar made a wrist only version i'm sure I would know unless they made it recently, all of theirs come with a chest strap because they know how important accurate data is to people that like their devices.
 
Psycho Sonny said:
I don't think the fitbit is the main thing here in this scenario, it's your dedication.

The fitbit is just doing the simple things for you like calorie counting and tracking activity. Both of which I do using food labels and readings on the treadmill, etc.

--snip--
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My dedication has come from using the FitBit. I fully accept that it's just doing stuff that I could quite easily do myself but the simple fact is that when I started doing this, it was that little lump of technology in my pocket which was driving me forward.

I'll admit that it's not so important now because if I don't walk during the day, I feel restless and am looking forward to my exercise time.

As an aside, I was at the local hospital on Friday because my daughter was in for minor surgery. Naturally I was a little stressed but I figured 'what the hell' and asked one of the nurses if she could check my blood pressure.

She did so and told me that it was "textbook perfect" and also told me what my resting heart rate is. Not being into fitness or exercise, I had no idea what resting heart rate was all about but she said that my figure of 53 was really good. I've looked into it since and every chart I've seen describes that as 'athlete'. Clearly I'm not an athlete but it's refreshing to know that I'm actually pretty fit now, despite still being overweight. I used to get out of breath after climbing a couple of flights of stairs so this regular walking has had a good effect on my general wellbeing as well as my weight.
 
Psycho Sonny said:
You may as well use your smartphone camera if your going to go into the whole wrist only HRM debate, it's most likely going to be just as accurate as a wrist only device.

Or you may as well just use an educated guess using your weight, height, age, sex and activity level to say how many calories you burned as that will be roughly as accurate as well as a wrist only device.

That's why HRM's use chest straps because accuracy is key to knowing exactly how much you burned. That is why fit bit doesn't come with a wrist only HRM it would make zero difference to the accuracy of it and would cost a lot more to make i imagine.

chest strap = accurate data

any other way isn't going to make the data any more accurate than it currently is i imagine, because they will be taking your personal info into account when calculating.

you may as well just use calculated guesswork instead of a wrist only version which is what fit bit actually does for you.


if Polar made a wrist only version i'm sure I would know unless they made it recently, all of theirs come with a chest strap because they know how important accurate data is to people that like their devices.
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So you've gone from denying their existence to an expert in their accuracy in a couple of hours.

Anyway nice work Feek the cost of the device is nothing compared to the obvious health benefits it's brought you, even if all it's done is provided something to give you goals to hit which make things much easier for people.
I'm the same I like to see numbers moving which then gives me something to beat.
 
Feek said:
My dedication has come from using the FitBit. I fully accept that it's just doing stuff that I could quite easily do myself but the simple fact is that when I started doing this, it was that little lump of technology in my pocket which was driving me forward.

I'll admit that it's not so important now because if I don't walk during the day, I feel restless and am looking forward to my exercise time.

As an aside, I was at the local hospital on Friday because my daughter was in for minor surgery. Naturally I was a little stressed but I figured 'what the hell' and asked one of the nurses if she could check my blood pressure.

She did so and told me that it was "textbook perfect" and also told me what my resting heart rate is. Not being into fitness or exercise, I had no idea what resting heart rate was all about but she said that my figure of 53 was really good. I've looked into it since and every chart I've seen describes that as 'athlete'. Clearly I'm not an athlete but it's refreshing to know that I'm actually pretty fit now, despite still being overweight. I used to get out of breath after climbing a couple of flights of stairs so this regular walking has had a good effect on my general wellbeing as well as my weight.
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a decent resting heart rate alone is by no means what i would call a good measure of fitness, it is one factor though of many.

also having a low one could be a sign of something being wrong or it could be that your actually quite healthy, many many factors need to be assessed.

cardio (being able to do 5K in 25 mins for a man and 30 mins for a woman)
strength (being able to do pull ups, dips, press ups with perfect form no bother)
resting heart rate (45-60)
body fat percentage (12-18)

i think all of these combined would give an accurate picture of how healthy someone is if you can tick yes to all of the above then you can officially say your quite fit and healthy.

although age is a really huge factor also, obviously as you get older cardio, strength and heart rate gets effected for the worse.
 
Another fifty days have passed so I'm, now up to 250 days.

I'm still walking the same distances and still counting my calories using MyFitnessPal (see my thread here) with adjustments due to exercise from the FitBit.

I'm still losing weight albeit a little slower this period than before. I put this largely down to a long weekend I had away in February that included four (yes, FOUR) full cooked meals per day, two of which were three course. I did a quick calculation on the calories I ate just for breakfast and I reckon it was 1300-1500 each day. I put on about half a stone over those days which of course I had to lose again.

My loss is now 8st 4lb. That's a total of 116lb or just over 52.5kg.

And as of this morning, when I got on the scales, I've finally shifted down from being 'obese' to being 'overweight' according to the NHS BMI charts.
 
BMI is a load of crap it doesn't account for muscle mass, it was a measurement made up by some skinny nerd/geek i imagine who doesn't know what muscles are.

e.g. it expects me to be 60-82 kg for my height which is a load of rubbish.
the only thing you should be relying on for if your obese, overweight, etc is a mirror or a proper body fat test. if you look overweight whilst standing in your underwear in a mirror (side profile as well as front), chances are you are overweight. if you look okay in the mirror chances are your weight is okay so you just need to focus on exercise for health/goals.
 
I mean this in the nicest possible way Feek does not sound like a man who trains for muscle mass or indeed trains at all, he just watches what he eats and makes sure he gets his activity in for people like that BMI is a pretty accurate in whether you could do with losing a few lbs or not.
 
I don't really have a specific weight target but I have a size. I'd like to be able to fit comfortably in the suit I wore for my wedding. I have a rough idea of what I think will be the right weight but it's not a set, specific goal.

tom_e - You're right. For me, BMI is a reasonable method of measurement. I'm not training hard or concentrating on anything other than losing body weight at the moment.
 
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