The Zen Leaf

Last week, I mentioned that I had to replace my Fitbit One tracker with a Fitbit Charge. This was not something I wanted to do. I wanted a hip-clip pedometer that tracks steps, miles, and elevation, which is exactly what the One did. The Charge tracks those three things, in addition to your heart rate, which is supposed to make the daily calories-burned number more accurate. (Oh, and they both track sleep, but I never really used that feature on the One and didn’t really care about it for the Charge.) So now, after using the Charge since the beginning of April, I have a review: it’s awful.

Wearing
The Charge is a wrist-tracker, which means several things. First, it’s frickin’ hot to wear in Texas. Second, it’s big and bulky and obviously screams, “I’M A FITBIT!” Third, it has metal contacts in order to track your heart rate, and after only two weeks of wearing it, I started getting a rash in that area. (Not uncommon for me – I’ve had this kind of metal contact allergy before.) It’s hard to see in the picture, but the top half of that indentation is red and raw and shiny, starting to shred. And that indentation? That’s after wearing the band loosely.

Accuracy
This is a four-part thing:

1. The so-called heart rate monitor is completely inaccurate, and it’s even worse when you’re doing any kind of exercise with your upper body. For example, when I’m using a pickaxe and shovel, my heart rate soars, but you could never tell from the wrist monitor because it slides around no matter how tight you wear it (because of the sweat from it being frickin’ hot to wear), so it never gets a real measure of what your heart rate is doing.
2. As for steps, it seems to count them accurately only if you’re actually just walking around. If I go to the grocery store and push around a cart for an hour, I might get 100 steps out of that hour. If I’m carrying something in my hand so that my arm doesn’t swing as I walk, I might as well not be walking at all. Seriously, Fitbit, if your wrist-trackers can’t track your steps when your arm is up/immobile, it isn’t accurate!
3. As for the sleep tracker and calorie tracker, I have no idea how accurate those are. I don’t really care about the sleep bit, and the calorie tracker seems to be extraordinarily high. Example: I took a two-mile walk on hills at an easy 20-min-mile pace. My Fitness Pal says that’s worth about 233 calories. I imagine that’s low, because it doesn’t take into account the hills. But the Charge tells me I’ve burned almost double that, at 455 calories. Um…that’s just TOO high. My daily calories burned have shot to an average of over 3000. Even my no-exercise, low-step days are around 2700. That’s a huge difference from what the One gave me (2300-2700), and the One seemed to be pretty spot on in terms of daily calorie tracking.
4. The elevation tracker doesn’t work very well either. I actually got the Charge instead of one of the smaller, cheaper Fitbits because it tracks elevation. However, I can go up five flights of stairs and have it only count the elevation as two flights. My One usually told me that a walk around my neighborhood – with lots of big hills – was about 25 flights of stairs in elevation. The Charge calls it under 15, sometimes as low as 10, and it varies from walk to walk even if I use the same route. Highly inaccurate.

Positives
There aren’t a lot of positives in this situation, but I will highlight the few perks I enjoyed in my couple weeks wearing this thing. Every hour, if you haven’t walked 250 steps, you get a little buzz to remind you. Similarly, the thing vibrates and celebrates when you hit your step goal. Lastly, it vibrates when you have a phone call or text and it shows the caller or message on its display. Those are lovely features, but they certainly don’t outweigh the rest of this mess.

Unfortunately, I don’t know what I can do if I want to continue having a step counter. Most companies have gone the wrist direction, no matter how many people complaining about it online (and there are a LOT of complaints). In the meantime, I’ve rebooted my old One and will see if I can keep it limping along until I find a better solution. If all else fails, I suppose I’ll have to get a Fitbit Zip, which is a hip-clip that tracks steps only. Not what I want, but what else can I do? Does anyone else know of any solid, accurate hip-clip trackers similar to the One?

My Fitbit One broke. Boooooo! I only got it for my birthday last year, though I’ve been using a One on and off for the last five years. I love that thing. It’s the most accurate pedometer I’ve ever come across and it tracked elevation as well! But sadly, the One seems to have been discontinued, so my replacement is a Fitbit Charge. It’s a wrist strap, which means that 1) it’s very sweaty here in hot Texas, 2) it doesn’t track your steps properly if you aren’t swinging your arm (like when you push a grocery cart), and 3) it has a built-in heart rate monitor that seems to be semi-accurate (not sure yet if this will be helpful or harmful!). I’m sure I’ll get use to it, but I’m taking a few seconds to mourn my One.

*****
I’ve been learning (again) about my body’s exercise coping techniques. Most of my exercise involves yoga, walking (either outdoor hills/trails or indoor flat easy walks), and an occasional dance or elliptical session. My body is not quite back to the level of running, and I learned a long time ago that strength training with heavy weights does me more harm than good. This last weekend, though, I spent several hours helping with the front yard landscaping job. This meant a lot of shoveling rocky soil and hauling heavy rocks and breaking up tough ground with a pickaxe.

This may not be heavy weights, but essentially it ended up doing the same thing to my body. At the end of the day, I was somewhat sore and tired, and I was also S-T-A-R-V-I-N-G. That’s not an exaggeration. I ate nearly 1500 calories for dinner alone after that workout. I’d eaten well the rest of the day, so I still managed to squeak in with a small deficit, but y’all? Eating 1500 calories at a meal is so not good! And here’s the thing: When I compare what I burned on that day on my Fitbit Charge to the day before when my exercise consisted of a two-mile walk and 45 mins of yoga, I burned identical calories through the day, and the walk + yoga didn’t make me eat everything in sight! Lesson learned. The yard is coming along nicely, though!

*****
I’m seeing numbers on my scale that I haven’t seen since July. When we moved back to Texas, circumstances were crazy enough for the month before and after our move that I bumped up to the higher end of the range I’d been maintaining for a year at that point. My scale has flirted with the bottom edge of my Texas weigh-ins for months now, but this week I finally broke through some invisible barrier. There’s obviously not a huge difference between one number and the next, but the mental boost of finally reaching that short-term goal is tremendous! Now on to the next goal!!

In lesser news, I had blood tests for the first time in six months. While some numbers were good, especially when it came to my blood sugar, my cholesterol is way up because my LDL is way up. Triglycerides are down a lot, but I’ve got to get the LDL under control. So I’ve got to change up the way I’m eating just a bit to get that fixed. Ironically, six months ago my LDL was the lowest it had ever been and my cholesterol was doing great. Sigh. At least my insulin issues seem to be controlled!

*****
Back before we moved to Boston in 2014, there was a certain two-mile walk I liked to take on summer evenings once the sun had started to go down and the humidity was very low. The walk took me out of my neighborhood and around the middle and elementary schools, and a big chunk of the walk took place on what our family called the “wiggly sidewalk.” The boys, when they were little, used to run up and down the curves yelling, “Wiggly! Wiggly! Wiggly!” It’s an old family memory. I took this photo of said wiggly sidewalk back on a walk in 2012:

Ever since moving back to San Antonio last summer, I’ve wanted to walk from my new neighborhood down to this area and back, a 3.5-mile round-trip route. This week, I finally did it! Monday morning was cool and cloudy and perfect. This is a relatively flat walk (other than curving up and down the wiggles, and some very small inclines along the main road), so I just took it easy and enjoyed being back around my old neighborhood. We’re not very far from our old house – about two miles – and it was a pleasure to get back down to the area again. It won’t be a route I walk often as it’s all on major roads and involves a lot of stopping and waiting at intersections, but I’m so glad I finally took the time to do something I’d wanted to do for eight months now!