My little fitness gadgets

About 6 months ago I decided it was time to lose some weight. What does someone who wants to lose some weight do? Obviously... hit Amazon and buy a few things! :)

The first thing was the most expensive. Garmin Forerunner 610 GPS with Heart RateMonitor. Did I use the Heart Rate Monitor? Not a lot... but I did a bit in the beginning and it helped me get a sense of how much each activity scores. How does it help *me*. Well - I was really bored running walking or whatever. By using it I’m able to record every time I walk. This is nice - I feel my time isn’t wasted if I record it. I make a little collection out of every activity (and unfortunately I like collecting things). Garmin has a great site and the routes + elevation + heart rate look great...

Here's how a (good) month looks like in my little collection:

Then I bought the Withings body analyzer (a.k.a. scale with wifi). It was trivial to get used to it. I just jump up there and either get depressed or happy :D Heheh.. I don't think that the body mass does fantastic work - but who cares? The point is that it's good to measure weight and even better if/when I do it frequently. With the scale... I can't forget it.

I connected both those on runkeeper. Obviously the best app out there for fitness tracking. Here's how the weight looks like for the last few months.

The point is that one can clearly see that I stopped being that motivated the last few weeks (I somehow started eating tons of sweets). Now what's the point of weighting yourself daily. Here it is:

The graph above shows the same time-range with more detail (daily detail). As you can see there's quite a bit of variance within a week and even more within a month. People talk about "measuring yourself once a week and making sure that you are in the same condition"... what does this really mean? "same condition"? That means among other things how much water you drunk the last few hours, how much you ate and tons of other things. Yeah - "same condition" ... I prefer to weight myself daily and let the app find give me average. Simpler isn't it?

Now - I bought myself a few books. Obviously The 4-Hour Body is the golden reference. It isn't that I follow anything it shows in there - but - I read the first 100 pages more or less and got the mentality. It's a good "hacker" approach that I really needed in order to get interested in the subject. I think Maximum Willpower (I've bought earlier) also influenced me a bit. I think that this gave me this perspective that it doesn't matter if you fail now and then and that discipline is a "muscle" that you have to train - and that it's a transferable skill (i.e. disciplined in food and training also means in work etc.). I think it's a very useful attitude.

This was also another great video on the subject. Posture - yes, posture - is in close loop with self-perception and moods. And this is how I bought lumo lift. It's a great little tool - they improve it all the time with software and when I turn the coach on it helps me remember to have a good posture while siting. Great - great! It also has extremely accurate measurement of steps as compared e.g. to wristband fitness trackers. Awesome! On the negative side I already washed one of them accidentally. Never mind - it's not that expensive! :)

I used the eatly app for a while. I was taking photos of meals and getting them rated through it. I got bored of it after a while though. Also I'm not sure why but I think voters (including myself) aren't really very sophisticated. Whatever looks healthy (green etc.) got voted quite a bit while other healthy but not healthy-looking things were getting average votes. Whatever. For a week or so - it helped get a sense of the very no - no's and all the rest.

Finally my - maybe - most accurate measurement for my "fitness status" came for free... It's just... my belt. Many people claim that weight is not accurate indication and waist size is actually way better. I don't know, sounds reasonable enough to me. But to be honest, how tight my belt feels indicates to me not just my "size" change but my mood change as well. If I eat a bit too much one day... my belt "indicator" instantly tells me... "you have to feel guilty now - told you!". Somehow it detects even fatty coffees - really don't know how it manages to be that picky. Like it a lot :)

So those are my little fitness gadgets. Quite fun, they create numbers... and I love numbers!