FitBit?

[juliansmom2003 3]

So, I think I am going to break down and get a calorie tracker to see how much I am burning and if that could have anything to do with this plateau! I saw Leigha's post a few days ago about the Body Bugg and did some research, and was this close to getting it, then my little sister who I exercise with during the week emailed me with this little device (and at this point, there is no charge to use the site--but I'm sure that may change too). Has anyone heard of it? It's called FitBit. Here is the link:

Fitbit

Heck, I couldn't think of a better thing to treat myself with!

[BetsyB 9]

I love the concept of these gadgets, but unless tracking your sleep is important to you, it doesn't seem to give any more information than a good pedometer (like an Omron).

The body bugg measures a variety of things to determine calorie burn. I couldn't find information that indicated that the fitbit does much more than count steps and, from that information, extrapolate an approximate calorie burn.

You can do that by using a pedometer. Or even by typing in how long you've exercised into a program like fitday (for free).

[jensmallwood 0]

It has a "motion detector," which I imagine is actually an accelerometer. The thing to note it that it works best with walking, running and activities in which your body is actually moving. This means that some activities will not be recorded properly. From their FAQ page:

Does the Fitbit accurately track calories from cycling/biking?

The Fitbit is optimized for walking, running and general household/lifestyle activities and gives you a good general 24 hour picture of your day. It's not going to be that accurate for things like biking, but the website will allow you to manually log activities, so that an estimated calorie burn for your biking can be included in your daily totals. If you are only doing the biking for an hour or so a day, the Fitbit will give you a good overview of your activities for the other 23 hours. The Fitbit is really for people to get a general sense of their day and get motivation from improvements in their general day to day trends.

the Body Bugg uses a variety of ways to track calorie expenditure, including galvanic skin response (which I think the amount of heat your body is releasing due to activity). So it does better with non-walking types of activities.

I say it's all about what you find motivational, and what's in your price range.

[YoungBlackAndBanded 0]

Also along with that (also from the FAQ page)

How do you calculate Calories Burned?

When nothing much is logged, we try to guess how many calories you have burned if you were sedentary. (Sedentary means you got out of bed, got dressed, went to your day job, came home and did nothing much more than walk to your car.) Once you start logging activities, we assume that you know best and we stop estimating; we use the data you provided. If you only log a small portion of your activity, we'll be missing a lot.

This, to me, doesn't do much more than other calorie/activity tracking websites like livestrong, fitday and the like. If you have to INPUT what activities you did, then what's the point?