What is a Fitbit?
You have most likely heard about the latest craze in fitness tracking and monitoring. Among the most popular brands of these monitors is the Fitbit. You wear it on your wrist, it tracks your activity throughout the day, and can monitor your sleep at night. It syncs with your smart phone, making it easy to track your activity throughout any given day. It comes with a preset goal of 10,000 steps per day, which is the standard set forth by the American Heart Association for the minimum amount of steps a person should take in a day to maintain a baseline of health and ward off disease. Of course you can change this goal to accommodate your level of activity. After only a few days of tracking, you will know if you are meeting your goals and can start to make adjustments accordingly. If you find you are only accumulating 3,000 steps per day, change the goal to 5,000. If you can consistently meet this goal for 3-4 weeks, change it again to 6,000. Keep increasing your daily goal every 3-4 weeks until you can consistently reach 10,000 steps per day.
If used as a whole fitness and dietary tracker, you can get a really good picture of your overall health. Utilize the food diary that is embedded in the app. Recording your food intake throughout the day is the best way to hold yourself accountable for the nutrition you are providing your body. Combining your actual level of activity with your actual food intake is the easiest way to see that you may need to either increase your activity level or decrease your calorie intake, or both.
Many of us may think that our day-to-day activities are providing our bodies with a sufficient level of exercise, but you may be surprised to find out that you are actually not moving enough throughout your day. Wearing a fitness-tracking monitor, such as a Fitbit, is a great way to find out. It definitely makes you think twice about avoiding shortcuts you may take in your day, such as parking further out in a grocery store parking lot, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, getting up and moving around the office a bit after you’ve been sitting at your computer for a few hours, etc. Forget the coffee breaks and “smoke breaks” of old. Take a walking break or a stretching break. If you find yourself short of your goal as the day draws to an end, take a short walk around the block. Climb your stairs a few times. It may sound silly, but keeping our bodies moving enough will not only meet the arbitrary number on your Fitbit , but it will ultimately improve your health and well-being.
In my next Weekly Fit Tip I will review some pros and cons of using a device such as Fitbit. Sign up here to get my weekly Fit Tips in your inbox!
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