I’m the first to admit that I’ve had a few really crap weeks lately, however I have put on less than a kilo, so the news isn’t all bad.
The core of the problem? My motivation died with the warm weather. The good old Nike FuelBand just became a monitoring tool rather than the motivator I crave. So I sold it on eBay for almost what I paid for it.
Sorry Nike, even competing with my friends only gave me half the solution I was looking for.
I also got really sick of tracking my meals with the Livestrong app. It’s great if you live in the States, but , you know, 95.5% of the world doesn’t. I think it’s ridiculously short sighted to make a product available globally that is designed for Americans, but so many companies do it, all the way up to car companies and tourist organisations. But I’ll come back to this rant later.
Sorry Livestrong, your half of the solution was bugging me too.
Ladies and Gentlemen, behold… FitBit One!!!
This does so much more than the FuelBand – it even monitors my sleep and knows how many flights of stairs I’ve climbed. It doesn’t have Nike’s arbitrary ‘Fuel’ measurement, but it does measure things accurately.
And it syncs with the free web service, via my phone, in the background. No more forgetting to sync.
But wait, it has brought something else to the party.
WiFi scales! OMG these are so brilliant…. they weigh me, work out the % of me that is fat and then upload it to the web service that then streams back to my app. Surely this can’t be as good as it seems… surely there must be a catch…
There is. The FitBit app for the iPhone sucks. I mean, it REALLY sucks.
The user experience is beyond terrible. It takes 4 or 5 taps just to add water to your daily intake as it’s buried in a menu under ‘More’ somewhere. Food entry is just as hard (try entering food that isn’t purchased in America – you’ll go crazy) and even though you can enter data in metric, it displays only water in ‘fl oz’.
As somebody who doesn’t live in the US of A, why should I know, or care, what a frickin’ fluid ounce is? I mean really… that’s just lazy design by people who aren’t aware that 95% of the world’s population live elsewhere.
Fortunately, the good and sensible folks at MyFitnessPal.com are aware that there is a world out there and they have linked their free service to FitBit. I can get all the benefits of the brilliant FitBit technology without having to suffer at the blinkered ignorance of their human interface team.
The FitBit web site is fantastic and pulls its data from the devices and your entries on your MyFitnessPal app.
So, to recap: FitBit hardware + FitBit web site + entering intake using the MyFitnessPal app = Complete information for weight loss, updated in real time throughout the day.
Now let’s see if I can hit 120kg by December 1st…..
The Big Man Shrinks 