After a while of umming and ahhing about whether or not to save up and buy a FitBit I got a parcel one Saturday morning and discovered JD had gone ahead and bought me one. And I love it.
I have a love/hate relationship with exercise. I love getting out into the countryside for a walk, I love swimming and I love dancing. Everything else just feels like a chore for me, there's no enjoyment to it and I have to force myself to do 20-30 minutes because I know how good it is for my body if I do. I spent a lot of last year doing stepping, running and yoga on our Wii Fit and while it made me feel increasingly fitter it also gave me a lot of bad feelings too. Dread at the thought of exercising everyday and guilt if I didn't do it.
I've decided that life is too short for unenjoyable activities though and from now on I'm only going to do the kinds of exercise that I enjoy. I can usually get to go on a walk once a week so the FitBit is there to step in (this is a hilarious pun by the way in case you missed it) on those days I can't stride out into nature for exercise.
You wear a FitBit all the time and it tracks all your movement. If you walk about, go up stairs, swim, dance about, have sex or whatever it tracks your movement. The best thing for me is the data it collects and then shows you in graph form how active you've been.You can access all the information on your computer or phone (or both, as I often do). It tracks steps, calories burned, distance in miles and very active minutes.
You can set your daily goal to whichever you like. I have a goal set to walk 10,000 steps in a day and do 60 minutes of very active minutes. It's usually between 4-5 miles a day. I've been using the FitBit for almost 3 weeks now and I've only had 1 day where I fell short of my goal. Also I just gained a 250km badge which is another awesome feature - achievements!!
Having a daily goal in mind helps me make good decisions when faced with a choice of stairs or lift. I'm more likely to offer to nip to the shop if we need something now whereas I'd usually let JD go before. I walk whenever there's an opportunity to walk and feel really pleased when I get home and check my steps so far for that day. You can tap the front of the FitBit anytime and it'll show you how you're doing on your daily goal. It lights up dots and each dot is one fifth of your goal. On the picture up there you can tell I'm at 4/5 of my goal.
You also get a weekly email summarising your activity. So you can feel all smug about it.
I'm starting to feel more in control of my exercising. I know I'm exercising for the enjoyment of feeling fitter and not just to see a difference on the scales like before. I've been reading a lot about the Health At Every Size idea. It's quite liberating to put my weight out of my mind and to just focus on getting fit instead. I've joined a supportive group called Fit Fatties and reading about lots of people like me doing all kinds of sports/exercise is very inspiring.
It's difficult to have a change in attitude about my weight in such a size obsessed world especially after years of feeling bad but I feel determined to do it. Hopefully I can. :)
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