Body Media Fit Review
Have you ever wondered how many calories you burn during the day? During your time at the gym, cleaning the house, shoveling snow, or even shopping? I know I have. I tried several methods of calculating my calorie expenditure including online calculators or using the displays on exercise equipment, but they never seemed accurate for me. After having gastric banding surgery, I was tracking what calories I was eating and was trying to increase my activity level, but it felt like I was missing an important piece of information.
A while ago I found a great solution. It is called the BodyMedia Fit (formally called GoWear Fit). Some of you may have seen its sister product, the Body Bugg, on shows like “The Biggest Loser”. This is almost identical and is actually produced by the same company. It is a device that you wear on your arm that gathers information like how you move, how many steps you take, how hot you are, how fast heat flows from your body, and how much you are sweating to calculate the number of calories that you are burning.
I wear the armband all day and night (except when in water) and at the end of the day I can upload my data to the web software and see how I did. The software shows many things including how many calories you burned, when you burned them, as well as how many steps you took, how much physical activity you engaged in, and how long you slept.
This has been a great tool to add to my arsenal. I found out immediately that I was greatly overestimating my activity level. I was a little shocked since I was exercising, but since it was low impact and the rest of my life was still sedentary, the activities just didn’t add up to enough calories. However within a day, everything changed.
The motivation I get from seeing where I am in relation to my fitness goals for the day is tremendous! I take that extra walk at lunch. I take an extra trip window shopping to increase my steps - I love the fact that shopping burns more calories than my old exercise routine! I can even see when my body gets used to a certain exercise routine and I need to change things up to keep burning the same calories. Even though it was a little pricey at $160 (plus a monthly fee of 6.95), buying the BodyMedia Fit is the best thing I have done besides having surgery.
Question: Can you wear it in the pool?
ReplyDeleteGilly, nope you can't use it in water. That is the only drawback in my mind. It can handle a little water like rain, but not swimming or anything like that. However, one thing you can do is add activities to any "off body" time. Once again you have to use an exercise calculator (they provide one) and it is subject to error, but I think it does use your historical burn to figure things out. Another thing is if you forget to put it on or something you can set the "off body" time to another similar day last week. For example, if I forget to put it on tomorrow until noon I can set the 8-12 time to be equal to what I burned last Tuesday or another day where I did similar activities.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the info. Is the armband noticeable under your shirts/sweaters? I did a bit of research after you mentioned it yesterday and combined with what you mention above I think I'm going to purchase one. It doesn't look like they have a Canadian retailer but they will ship to Canada which is great.
ReplyDeleteSome times people do see it and some times they can't. It really depends on what kind of shirt you have on. However, if you are someone who doesn't want to tell some people about the band then like me when people ask about it you can use it to help explain your weight loss :) I tell people at work that I am focusing on what I eat and how much I use and I have a couple tools that help me out including my BodyMedia Fit.
ReplyDeleteI think I will get one of these! On another subject, can you tell me how you do your before & afters all side by side like that, I'd really like to try!
ReplyDeleteDee, there are a few ways of doing it depending on your software. One way that was suggested by another blogger was to use powerpoint. You can insert both images on one slide and then save the slide as a image file (jpeg or gif).
ReplyDeleteAnother way is to use a image editing software. You could open the one image (save it as something else) and then "expand the canvas". There may be a command called this or in some programs like paint you have to drag the canvas over (but finding the right "handle" may be a pain). Just make sure you expand completely to the left or right. You should double the size of the picture, but one half will be white. Then open your other picture and copy and paste it into the picture with the expanded canvas. You should be able to move it to the white space that you created.
Another way is to use an image editing software (there are some freebees like photoscape). Some of them have a "stich" feature. I haven't actually used it yet, but the concept would be to size two seperate pictures the way you want them (cropped the way you want). Then save them. Open the software and tell it you want to stich the two pictures together. You should end up with one side by side picture.