Fitbit

[Lamb]

Does anyone here use a Fitbit?

I have recently activated mine and it's a Zip and I'm finding it's not registering all my steps. I'm not a bouncy walker when I'm moving through the house...I guess I sort of glide around? LOL So it's not giving me all my steps. I still get 10,000 in easily each day but I wonder how many are not showing up. I have tried to move it to a different placement on my clothes and for a day it seems to go well and then I notice another day that it's not.

 

[tango]

Does anyone here use a Fitbit?

I have recently activated mine and it's a Zip and I'm finding it's not registering all my steps. I'm not a bouncy walker when I'm moving through the house...I guess I sort of glide around? LOL So it's not giving me all my steps. I still get 10,000 in easily each day but I wonder how many are not showing up. I have tried to move it to a different placement on my clothes and for a day it seems to go well and then I notice another day that it's not.

I use it but only casually, most of the time the only interest I have in it is when I do a long walk in the woods and like to see the floors racking up. My most basic walk is about 6 miles with 1300 feet of elevation gain, so that's about 12000 steps and 130 floors. That's if I just go up the mountain and back down. If I go down the other side and back up-and-over then it chalks up more like 20,000 steps and 250 floors. Maybe this year I'll go up and over the next ridge along, I'm keen to see if I can hit 500 floors in a day, but it also means taking in probably 25-30 miles of hiking. That means hauling an awful lot of water around with me.

 

[psalms 91]

And weight a gallon of water weighs 7 pounds

 

[Lamb]

I use it but only casually, most of the time the only interest I have in it is when I do a long walk in the woods and like to see the floors racking up. My most basic walk is about 6 miles with 1300 feet of elevation gain, so that's about 12000 steps and 130 floors. That's if I just go up the mountain and back down. If I go down the other side and back up-and-over then it chalks up more like 20,000 steps and 250 floors. Maybe this year I'll go up and over the next ridge along, I'm keen to see if I can hit 500 floors in a day, but it also means taking in probably 25-30 miles of hiking. That means hauling an awful lot of water around with me.

Yours gives floor count? That's cool. Mine only gives steps, calories, miles (it's not accurate) and a clock for the time of day.

 

[tango]

And weight a gallon of water weighs 7 pounds

I know.... I've started out a hike with most of a gallon of water in my backpack. Thankfully by the end of the hike it weighs a lot less I keep thinking I should look into the portable water purifiers so I can refill my bottles from the many streams I encounter.

That said I've hiked with much heavier packs than that. One day, over much more forgiving terrain, I ended up hiking about 15 miles with a 50lb backpack on. I was glad to take it off at the end of the hike. I used to carry more stuff in a backpack - usually it came in somewhere around 20-25lb - but then realised than on a lot of my shorter hikes I wasn't needing it. My standard 6-mile hike is much easier now - I take a couple of 24oz water bottles that I can hold in my hand or clip on my belt, and a few granola bars in my pocket. I usually carry very basic first aid provisions, and my cellphone.

 

[tango]

Yours gives floor count? That's cool. Mine only gives steps, calories, miles (it's not accurate) and a clock for the time of day.

Yes, I use the old Fitbit One. I tried the Charge and really badly wanted to like it but the reality was that I hated just about every single aspect of it. I didn't like the wrist band, I didn't like the bulk, the curvature didn't fit my wrist well, it kept waking me up at night with its lights and I hated having to keep flicking my wrist just to get it to light up to show me the time. Oh yes, and they fall apart depressingly quickly (I think I had three of them fall apart within a year). Aside from that I loved it

The distance mine reports is usually fairly accurate. I've hiked with the Fitbit and a GPS, and they report similar distances. The floor count is a bit variable - apparently mine has some form of altimeter - but the walk up the mountainside ends up reporting anything from about 110-135 floors. It's usually in the 125 range but the fact that a 1250-foot climb can vary by 100 feet in either direction (an 8% variation) does cast doubts on how accurate it is.

My biggest peeve about the calorie counting is that it shows what you've burned so far today. It guesstimates your daily usage based on just living but doesn't give any indication what you might need to do to make sure you meet your goal. It would make so much more sense if it could give more useful reports, like setting a target for calorie usage over and above what it takes to simply stay alive, rather than a target for total calorie burn when it's tricky to work out how many I'll burn between now and midnight by simply continuing to breathe.

 

[Lamb]

The calorie count on mine doesn't seem consistent for my step amounts. Besides that I have a broken thyroid and I know I'm not burning those calories or I'd be thinner!

 

[tango]

The calorie count on mine doesn't seem consistent for my step amounts. Besides that I have a broken thyroid and I know I'm not burning those calories or I'd be thinner!

Mine includes base metabolism in the calorie count so if I sit in my recliner for the entire day it still shows I burned however many calories it is. Not that I sit in my recliner for an entire day very often but it's not unheard of for me to leave my Fitbit on the dresser for an entire day when I shift stuff from one pair of pants to another - usually it sits on my keychain and sometimes doesn't make the move. If I shift from working pants to dress pants it's more likely it will get left behind.

The inclusion of base metabolism is a drag because the target becomes meaningless. It might say I've burned 2800 calories of a 3000 calorie target but if it's only 6pm the chances are it will credit the remaining 200 by the time I go to bed even if I do nothing more strenuous than lifting a glass of beer to my mouth.

 

[Lamb]

Mine includes base metabolism in the calorie count so if I sit in my recliner for the entire day it still shows I burned however many calories it is. Not that I sit in my recliner for an entire day very often but it's not unheard of for me to leave my Fitbit on the dresser for an entire day when I shift stuff from one pair of pants to another - usually it sits on my keychain and sometimes doesn't make the move. If I shift from working pants to dress pants it's more likely it will get left behind.

The inclusion of base metabolism is a drag because the target becomes meaningless. It might say I've burned 2800 calories of a 3000 calorie target but if it's only 6pm the chances are it will credit the remaining 200 by the time I go to bed even if I do nothing more strenuous than lifting a glass of beer to my mouth.

I wonder how my Zip is configuring calories. It might be based on my exercise and how many minutes it's detecting constant movement? I've increased my exercise to an hour or more a day now.

 

[tango]

I wonder how my Zip is configuring calories. It might be based on my exercise and how many minutes it's detecting constant movement? I've increased my exercise to an hour or more a day now.

I think the algorithm is pretty simple and largely based on the weight you entered. From your weight it knows how many calories it takes to move a mile and can take a best guess as to how many calories it takes to stay alive, and so it just adds them up. Of course the number of calories it takes to stay alive varies based on whether you're standing, sitting or lying down but it can probably figure which one you're doing based on how many steps you're taking. If you haven't taken a single step in 20 minutes the chances are you're sitting down....

 

[Lamb]

When my husband and I were brewing his beer I knew I was moving around a lot but it didn't register steps since my movements were too small to be detected. I was on my feet for 3 hours and only had a few hundred steps!! Those were probably because I went up and down the stairs a couple times!

I try to move the fitbit around to a different location on my body but sometimes it's just not counting my steps and I'm standing there watching it not count as I move. I wonder if I should replace the battery?

 

[tango]

When my husband and I were brewing his beer I knew I was moving around a lot but it didn't register steps since my movements were too small to be detected. I was on my feet for 3 hours and only had a few hundred steps!! Those were probably because I went up and down the stairs a couple times!

I try to move the fitbit around to a different location on my body but sometimes it's just not counting my steps and I'm standing there watching it not count as I move. I wonder if I should replace the battery?

I think for best results it wants to be as close to your hip as possible. The One comes with a clip and one suggest location for ladies is to clip it to their bra. I don't know how well it works clipped there - I keep mine either in the ticket pocket of my jeans or clipped to the very top of my pocket if I'm wearing sweat pants or shorts. It doesn't always count steps, it doesn't always count floors, but it gives an idea of how active (or inactive) you've been during the day.

I get frustrated with mine when I've been working on the house. Yesterday I spent probably 4 hours moving back and forth, prying baseboards, pulling down plaster, bagging up lumps of plaster, running the vacuum cleaner to suck up the fine dust, pulling more baseboards, banging nails out of the baseboards, carrying bags of plaster downstairs, going up and down stairs fetching tools etc. At the end of it all apparently I chalked up 32 flights of stairs and 0 active minutes.

I think Fitbit only starts counting once you've been active for 10 minutes, where "active" means taking a certain number of steps per minute. So if you're doing the sort of thing I was doing, something like going downstairs to get something, going back up the stairs, but then not taking identifiable steps because you're prying something off a wall and only moving short distances from one nail to the next and back to the first, it will register activity but not enough to start counting "active minutes". It feels good to finish working because I ran out of light, feeling like I'd really worked hard for some hours, and then see Fitbit telling me I basically did nothing all day.

 

[Lamb]

When I first move the fitbit to a new location it seems to work really well but the 2nd day it's back to not counting all the steps. So I move it again! Sometimes it takes about 10 seconds to actually get the steps on the device after I've moved which is odd. It's like a delayed reaction. Does yours do that?

 

[tango]

When I first move the fitbit to a new location it seems to work really well but the 2nd day it's back to not counting all the steps. So I move it again! Sometimes it takes about 10 seconds to actually get the steps on the device after I've moved which is odd. It's like a delayed reaction. Does yours do that?

I think that's by design, it's looking to see if you are actually walking rather than just bumping it. If you shift position in your recliner the motion of the Fitbit would be much the same as you taking a step, so it waits until you've taken a few before counting them. Usually if I take a few steps while watching it I find it does nothing for 9-10 steps and then counts them all at once.

It's probably part of the reason it chalks up very few steps when I'm working on the house because I often take just one or two steps at a time, perhaps with long enough between steps that it doesn't register them at all. If I'm working in one of the smaller rooms, or in a room where everything is relatively close to hand, it's entirely possible I will take 6-7 steps to get from where I'm working to a tool I need, pause a while to shuffle tools around, take 6-7 steps to get back, 3 steps up a ladder, then do some work, rinse and repeat, and find that most of my steps don't get counted.

 

[Lamb]

That makes sense. To us a step is a step. But to a Fitbit a step isn't a step until you make more than a certain number consecutively. LOL

 

[tango]

That makes sense. To us a step is a step. But to a Fitbit a step isn't a step until you make more than a certain number consecutively. LOL

To a Fitbit a bump might be a step or it might be a lazy person shifting in their recliner while reaching for the TV remote. It needs a few bumps to figure out if a bump is a step or not

That said you can swing a Fitbit and make it count steps. I keep meaning to challenge a friend of mine who works in retail and spends most of the day walking in the store, but not tell them that I strapped my Fitbit to the pendulum of a clock. I reckon doing that I can chalk up 80,000 steps in a day without too much trouble, maybe more.

 

[Lamb]

LOL Yeah a friend of mine said (in a derogatory way) how she bumped up her numbers on her odometer but I want my numbers from actual steps to know I'm moving and not my arms. My arms can get their own workout separately

 

[tango]

LOL Yeah a friend of mine said (in a derogatory way) how she bumped up her numbers on her odometer but I want my numbers from actual steps to know I'm moving and not my arms. My arms can get their own workout separately

One day I was just curious, and tied my Fitbit to a string and let it swing between my fingers while I was sitting in my recliner. Over the course of half an hour I apparently walked 2 miles, if the resulting step count was to be believed.

Not something I'd do as a matter of routine - like you I want to see what I actually did rather than how inventive I was at cheating - but curious to see how it can be cheated.