Well with week two in the books with my fitbit I’ve found out less is more. In comparison of the two weeks, week one had 11000 less steps yet I managed to burn about 800 more calories. The comparison also showed a difference of 5.4 miles (week two had the higher miles). The report also showed that I had a thirty-four floor difference in the two weeks, the second week having the increase of course. Although it’s been recording more sleep time for me I’m still finding myself feeling tired and run down. Last week I did manage to gain a few badges that include ten floors of stairs, twenty-five floors of stairs and my fifty mile badge. It’s pretty amazing to sit back and look at the numbers, of which I was totally unaware of. If you’d ask me how much I thought I’d walk in a week I would have thought maybe a couple of miles, not the twenty plus that I’ve averaged over the last few weeks. While I haven’t been using my fitbit to track my food intake I have been trying to track my water intake and track weight loss. What did I take away from my two week comparison you ask? While my miles were up, my calories burned were down and water consumption is still not where it needs to be. I plan to try and make a conscious effort to increase my water intake and also start to take the stairs at work instead of the elevator. I’m very curious to see how these two little things change the numbers… For better or worse.

Do you track your weekly miles walked and nutritional needs? If so, how and do you find it to be beneficial?

A few weeks ago I sat around wondering exactly what my daily stats were so I went and researched different activity tracking devices. I ended up buying a fitbit one as it had all the features I was looking for. The overall size of the unit is fairly small and I honestly forget that I’m even wearing it. The unit stays charged for days and will generally recharge in a couple of hours. Well after a week of using it, I realized I wasn’t drinking enough water. This really didn’t come as a surprise to me but the ability to track my meals and water intake quickly pointed this out again. The other thing I hadn’t realized until I saw my weekly report is how much walking I generally do in a week’s time. While the unit links up with my PC it also links up to either my iPhone or iPad as well. Between the 3 devices it’s constantly monitoring my total steps, total distance, floors climbed, calories burned and also sleep duration (although I only tried it once for the first week). Looking through the report was a real eye opener as I didn’t realize how much unintentional exercise I was doing and not recording. In the next few weeks I hope to have more to report on the device but for now I’ll leave you with a screenshot of my 1^st week’s report. I was a bit under on some of the categories but know where I lack and what I need to improve on in my day-to-day activities. This will be the beginning of the many changes to come in order to make me a better player on the field and better person off the field.

Have you tried any devices to track your day to day activity? How did they work out for you?