My New Fitbit Flex: Product Review
Hey, all! I'm here to today to share with you one of my best presents yet!
For Christmas, I got a Fitbit Flex. There are pros and cons to it, but overall I've had a really great experience with it so far! I wanted to do a quick post about it for any of you that have heard of the Fitbit and are contemplating whether or not to splurge the money on one!
(Picture courtesy of Fitbit.)
First of all, you may be wondering how it works. I had doubts about the accuracy of the product at first, but I found THIS PAGE, and it answered all of my questions.
Fitbit Flex: Pros
There are quite a few pros of the Fitbit flex, as compared to workout watches or pedometers.
1. It's small and can be an accessory.
The band is the size of a bracelet, and it comes in up to 10 different colors! Ryan got me a pack of colors, so I have the green, pink, and black, and I love changing out bands to make it match my outfit/other jewelry that I may be wearing that day. It's also not noticeable at all while wearing it, so unlike a bulky pedometer you can wear this all the time!
2. You can track SO MANY THINGS.
The software for Fitbit is very user-friendly, and you can track a multitude of things with it. As you can see, it tracks:
*steps,
*calories eaten (although you must manually enter them either online or in the app for your phone),
*friend activity,
*when you are most active throughout the day (with an hour-by-hour histogram),
*recent exercise (manually input, sort of, I will explain more later),
*sleep,
*weight (by manually entering it),
*calories burnt (based on steps taken, high intensity activity, and distance moved),
*"very active minutes" where you are taking a large number of steps/small amount of time,
*distance,
*water intake (manually entering),
*and weekly activity.
3. The Fitbit is VERY goal-driven.
I love the goal aspect of the Fitbit as compared to other workout watches or pedometers. When you are setting up your device, it will ask you to set up a step goal and a distance goal for each day, and as you can see in the photo above, it shows you how far you are from your goal as you check in each day.
It also shows you by tapping the actually fitbit band you are wearing twice, and allowing dots to light up. The way I have my settings, each dot stands for a mile out of my daily distance goal. When I wake up in the morning, one dot blinks, but by the end of the day, there will (hopefully) be five showing.
The Fitbit software also awards you badges for each goal that you meet. For example, there is a lifetime distance badge (so when you walk 26 miles since you start wearing your fitbit, you will earn a badge), and the amount increases each time. There is a daily step badge, so for instance you will get a badge when you hit 10,000 steps in a day, then they will bump it up to a new badge for 15,000 steps, then 20,000, and so on. The badges are nice encouragement, and a good way to push yourself if you compare with friends.
Also, the Fitbit allows you to set up a goal-driven food plan. I will talk more about this in the next section because the food plan is one of my favorite features of the Fitbit software!
4. The food plan option
The food plan option is an awesome and unique feature for the Fitbit program. The food plan allows you to pick your settings so that you pick a certain amount of weight you would like to lose each week. There is an easy, moderate, kind of hard, and very hard food plan options.
What I love about the food plan, is the fitbit adjusts the amount of calories you can take in by observing how active you are. The great thing about this is that if you walk a lot of steps at your daily job, it takes these into account as well, as compared to just entering your exercise into a calorie-tracking app on your phone. So your daily allowed calorie intake will change from day-to-day, depending on how active you are on day. On Monday, I could meet my 5 mile goal and be able to eat 500 more calories than on Tuesday, where I had to ride in a car for 4 hours of the day and only got about 3 miles of walking in. I love that it adjusts!
5. The Sleep-Tracking Option
(Just FYI, I am usually a great sleeper. I apparently slept horribly the night I tracked this sleep, because normally I wake up zero times, am restless twice, and I have 99-100% sleep efficiency…weird!)
The sleep tracking option is pretty fun to watch, although maybe not essential to have in a device. As you can see in the photo above, the Fitbit shows how long you were in bed, how many hours you actually slept (based on how restless/awake you were throughout the night), and gives your sleep efficiency based on that data. it's pretty fun!
Fitbit Flex: Cons
1. All the manual entering.
I know it's crazy to expect something to automatically know how many calories you've eaten or water you've drank (although I'm sure that's coming soon), but it does stink having to pull it up and enter it in throughout the day. On the flip side, I don't know of another product that has a feature where you don't have to manually enter it (if anyone does, please leave a comment/link in the section below; I'd love to check it out!).
2. The exercise options.
I am still trying to figure out the exercise options on the Fitbit software online. It's so iffy on how I want to do it day-to-day. For example, you can either do an "activity record", where you enter the time you started working out and the time you stopped, and it looks at how many steps you took in that time to see how many calories you burnt. This stinks for activities like yoga or circuit training, where you may not be actually taking that many steps but you are still burning calories.
On the other hand, you can enter in activities and it will estimate calorie burn based on your weight/your activity level, etc. This is nice, BUT the PROBLEM is that it will add those steps in (an estimate of how many steps you may have taken doing that activity) to what was already picked up by your tracker.
So for instance, I took 1000 steps doing my daily workout, but the Fitbit only picked up 400 of these steps, I would want to enter it in manually so I could get more credit for calories burnt. The problem is, it still picked up 400 of those steps, so then I would be giving myself 400 more steps than I actually took. Maybe it's the Type A personality in me, and this won't bother you, but this is one of the biggest complaints I've had about the Fitbit.
3. The price.
I know not everyone has $100+ dollars to be shoveling out on technology, and sadly, I wouldn't get any of the older models than the flex. A few friends have the newer versions (like the Charge and the Surge), but with the nice features the price also increases quite a bit.
I would suggest getting this product only if you are serious about using it for a long period of time, because the price is a tad high and you should be sure about the product before you invest in it.
Overall, I like the Fitbit Flex. I check in on the software multiple times a day, I enjoy making progress and the goal-driven mindset of the Fitbit. This is something that fits me. If you aren't completely sure that this is the fit for you, other companies make a similar version (such as Garmin), but I have no experience with those products.
That wraps up today's post! Catch ya back here next week sometime for a post on some resolutions!
Past Product Reviews
Mio Motiva Pink Exercise Watch
Orange Circle Studio Daily Planners
Yonanas Healthy Frozen Dessert Maker
Koelzer’s Bee Farm Lotion Bars
Luna Protein Bars: Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough
Nature’s Path Organic Foods: Macaroon Crunch Granola Bars
GRAZE Healthy Snacking Boxes
Koelzer Bee Farm Flavored Creamed Honeys