The Fitbit ecosystem has served me well, but I've finally decided to leave it behind for Google Fit and MyFitnessPal. There are definitely some tradeoffs that I'll get to in a bit, but it's been kind of a worrisome transition.
Like most people who've lost a lot of weight, you become paranoid about changing from the formula that got you to where you are and gaining it all back. The simplified Fitbit system made keeping track of things easy, whereas Google Fit only tracks your activity. You need to hook in a separate nutrition app, and the dashboard just isn't as clean as Fitbit's.
The thing that annoyed me most about Fitbit was step count accuracy. If you're wearing a hip mounted tracker, it was always going to be a lot more accurate than something worn on your wrist. Your wrists are constantly moving and doing various tasks, and while they've done a pretty good job at tuning the gyro in it to eliminate most of the statistical noise, I don't think there's any way to get it pretty close to perfect. For example, I was watching my "step count" increment pretty substantially while folding laundry the other day.
To be fair, Fitbit never claimed to be scientifically accurate. Most people just want the convenience of wearing their tracker on their wrists for watch replacement and quick glances at their approximate stats. I get it.
The Fitbit One is really the best when it comes to accuracy, but it's old and the support for it isn't great anymore. It would still sometimes crash leaving me missing a lot of steps before I would realize it. I think their replacement for it is the Fitbit Zip, but I figured if I'm going to use a separate waist-mounted step tracker, I might as well just use my phone, which is also waterproof and I always keep it charged for all the other reasons one keeps their phone charged.
Also, Fitbit is so obsessed with running up step totals for bragging rights among friends that they deliberately include "steps" counted while doing other activities like riding a bike. Both my Fitbit Ionic and Flex 2 would auto-detect when I would be on a bike ride, so it should be able to deduct all the road bumps that register as steps from your activity dashboard. But, it doesn't. From what I gathered on the forums, they did this by design because people wanted "credit" for doing things other than walking.
Like most people who've lost a lot of weight, you become paranoid about changing from the formula that got you to where you are and gaining it all back. The simplified Fitbit system made keeping track of things easy, whereas Google Fit only tracks your activity. You need to hook in a separate nutrition app, and the dashboard just isn't as clean as Fitbit's.
The thing that annoyed me most about Fitbit was step count accuracy. If you're wearing a hip mounted tracker, it was always going to be a lot more accurate than something worn on your wrist. Your wrists are constantly moving and doing various tasks, and while they've done a pretty good job at tuning the gyro in it to eliminate most of the statistical noise, I don't think there's any way to get it pretty close to perfect. For example, I was watching my "step count" increment pretty substantially while folding laundry the other day.
To be fair, Fitbit never claimed to be scientifically accurate. Most people just want the convenience of wearing their tracker on their wrists for watch replacement and quick glances at their approximate stats. I get it.
The Fitbit One is really the best when it comes to accuracy, but it's old and the support for it isn't great anymore. It would still sometimes crash leaving me missing a lot of steps before I would realize it. I think their replacement for it is the Fitbit Zip, but I figured if I'm going to use a separate waist-mounted step tracker, I might as well just use my phone, which is also waterproof and I always keep it charged for all the other reasons one keeps their phone charged.
Also, Fitbit is so obsessed with running up step totals for bragging rights among friends that they deliberately include "steps" counted while doing other activities like riding a bike. Both my Fitbit Ionic and Flex 2 would auto-detect when I would be on a bike ride, so it should be able to deduct all the road bumps that register as steps from your activity dashboard. But, it doesn't. From what I gathered on the forums, they did this by design because people wanted "credit" for doing things other than walking.
Google Fit auto detects and maps out my bike rides using my phone's GPS and doesn't use road bumps to pad my step totals.
Also, my experience has been that MyFitnessPal's nutrition database is superior to Fitbit's, but what they make up for in comprehensiveness they give back in a cluttered mess of an interface. I guess this can be improved if you subscribe for the pay-version of it, but whatever it costs is that much more than this cheapo is willing to pay.
On the downside, this new arrangement does require that I keep my phone on me all the time in order to get an accurate step count. I normally do anyway, but this also means that I need to always keep it on me while doing stuff around the house, which I sometimes wouldn't in the past.
I guess I could workaround this with an Android watch of some sort, but then I'm back to charging a watch every day or two, which is unacceptable. I could tolerate charging the Ionic every week or so with the raise-to-wake function turned off, but charging a watch every day is a major hassle.
Also on the downside, it was nice having the Ionic's heart rate monitor, but ultimately, it's not all that useful for most people's purposes. I did, however, find the sleep tracking a lot more useful than I thought I would. The REM cycle, light/deep sleep, and awake timer dashboard is very cool, but knowing exactly how much sleep you got the night before is particularly useful since it helps you know what kind of day you're about to have and what to ask of yourself as far as activities.
Ultimately, though, my left wrist is valuable real estate, and the most important thing that I need it to tell me is the time. I found myself often using my teeth or nose to press the wake button on the Ionic to check the time if my right hand were occupied. It wasn't a huge hassle, but it would happen often enough for me to notice it. It was still a better tradeoff than raise-to-wake and needing a charger every 4 days.
When it comes down to it, I just like being able to change up my wrist watches. My brother got married last weekend, and I wore a fancy watch that was passed down to me from my father. Now, I'm back wearing my Casio ProTrek, but maybe I'll switch it up with something else next week.
Whatever you do, just make sure you use something. Even if you're just using a nutrition tracker without a step tracker, as long as you're hitting your calorie inputs every day, it's not super-critical to know your output if you live a reasonably active lifestyle. Since most people already carry a phone with them most of the time anyway, you might as well turn on a step tracking feature since it costs you nothing.
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