Fitbit One: We Welcome Our New Fitness Overlord

Nerd on the RunBeige

Raina and the kids got me a Fitbit One for my birthday.  I was skeptical at first, being a dedicated MyFitnessPal user (the iPhone app is phenomenal), as fitness tracking goes.  But I set it up, clipped it to my pants pocket and have grown to love it.  In fact, I have developed an involuntary pocket touch, to make sure I have it clipped on.

A Fitbit tracks your steps, stairs, distance, and estimated calories burned (as well as weight, BMI and a lot of other stuff I don’t track).  Best of all, the Fitbit One tracks your sleep.  Based on when I know I am awake, it seems to be amazingly accurate.  It automatically syncs to your computer and/or your iPhone (via bluetooth).  It generates daily, weekly and monthly reports, with lots of detail.  Here’s a summary of my current weekly chart.


I woke up a lot Friday night, and fell below my typical 98% sleep efficiency.


It also awards you badges for the number of stairs and steps you take in a day.  This sounds sort of dumb, but is strangely effective.  I don’t often have a 40,000 step day, but I often do a little extra if I’m closing in on 30,000.


I still use MyFitnessPal to track my food and my runs and walks.  But I have integrated my Fitbit into my athletic nerdity.  It probably does more to motivate me than anything else.  I believe the distance numbers it reports are a bit high, based on how far I run each day, but it’s close enough and clearly gives you a baseline to work towards or improve on each day.

I recommend Fitbit highly, but beware of its power.  Once you get a string of high step days, the idea of missing a day is really troubling.

Calling All Germaphobes

Here’s a very helpful- and somewhat scary- infographic (that there is a fancy word for picture) from Keeping It Kleen.


My big germ thing is shoes.  It completely boggles my mind that most people (us included) walk around inside their houses with their shoes on.  The same shoes that walk in all kinds of who knows what day after day.  There is a tree in front of our house.  Lots of birds congregate there.  There is always a big pile of bird poop on the sidewalk.  People walk across that sidewalk on their way to our door.

If I could go back in time, I would ban shoes in my house.  I’m not kidding.