Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have an impressive success story in weight loss using Fitbit . To Lose weight, Fitbit 'alone' will not be enough. To be successful, you need little more than that. My Sincere hope that this review helps you with that edge: WHO I AM : This review represents an average American. Middle aged Male, Non Smoker, Slightly overweight with a beer belly,always busy, drives kids around to school and after care programs, drowsy during day because he is short of sleep, thanks to TV . He goes to gym, He Loves to eat unhealthy food but buys lot of healthy groceries, some of them will end up in garbage. He never uses the Elevators and walk the stairs carrying a 400 calorie Frappucino. WHERE I WAS : And Fitbit (Force) came in... I had a BMI of 27 and had to lose about 16 pounds . Many of you might laugh at a trivial number of 16 pounds but I have been overweight for the past 20 years, never able to lose serious weight by any method. You can calculate your BMI by visiting the site nhlbi dot nih dot gov. BMI might be misleading indicator for an athlete,but this review is targeted towards an overweight male. I used Fitbit Force for a year and things changed. WHERE I AM : Fitbit Force was discontinued for some health issues and ended up without Fitbit for few months, until Fitbit Charge was introduced. I had lost about 11 lbs in six months, slow and steady, without starving , making healthy choices.. More on it below: A DAY AFTER FITBIT-CHARGE: I play Tennis with my 10 year old Kid on Saturday mornings. After having Fitbit, was motivated to play another 20 minutes extra . After the tennis, go to a Dunkin Donut nearby and got a Low Fat Blueberry muffin. Casually added in Myfitnesspal and I nearly fell off my chair.. 410 calories. Stopped eating half and took the remaining home. Was busy all day with some tasks and before going to bed, noticed I was still short 1700 steps to my target goal. So walked around the block for another 15 minutes, getting some time away from TV and sucking in fresh air. Courtesy of Fitbit , and fresh air went to bed early at 10 PM instead of the 11:30 PM. These are small ,but important changes that will happen in your life. WHAT FITBIT CHARGE DOES: TRACKS : Fitbit counts steps ..... accurately. You can carry your phone or push a shopping cart (meaning the hand is not moved) , walk 100 steps and the number of steps would have incremented by one hundred. Do not worry, after few days of this fun exercise, you will eventually notice that you are steadily increasing the walk. You will notice that at the end of the day you are short by several thousand steps and slow and steadily you will get to the 10,000 steps a day. If for any reason, the count is incorrect, go to the dashboard and you can set the stride length. ACTIVE MINUTES: Is a nice feature where it says how active you were. I will not say this as top notch but nevertheless it has to be an important aspect in healthy lifestyle. Example :Playing volleyball hardly adds to active minutes STAIRS : Fitbit tracks climbing stairs, an important fitness regimen in pursuit of healthy weight loss and maintenance. I am not a fan of Fitbit Flex Wireless Activity + Sleep Wristband, Black because it misses measuring stairs, an important component of being healthy. SLEEP : We lack Sleep. Period. We are obsessed with Food and weight but do not pay much attention to Sleep. Even kids run short of sleep . Fitbit tracks your sleep. Just wear it and go to bed. Over a period of time, it just tells you, " dude, go better get some sleep !, don't lie to yourself. ".When your manager makes a passing comment that you are very focused these days, remember it is because your sleep got better thanks to Fitbit. .. As a suggestion, try not to wear Fitbit charge couple of days a week, to avoid possible allergic rashes. COSMETIC : Fitbit has a primary purpose to make you fit,the rest is optional . Two of them needs to be mentioned. The first one is the clock with optional Date, that makes it a watch. Second one is that I do not have to press the knob to see the time and tapping displays it. I am not much into smartphone calls, caller Id Display so will leave it for someone else to opine about it. CONS: The strap is still not easy and convenient. It is an electronic appliance and all laws of 'breakage'will apply. Make sure not to damage it with water, DO not take it to swimming, or drop it on the floor.I have worn it for hours together playing and sweating and that seems to be ok .The tracker does not have a GPS option or does not track Heart rate , pulse or blood pressure. Fitbit is introducing a model with Heart Rate in next few months ( like every other competitor). THE LARGER PURPOSE: If you are determined to fool Fitbit, you can; Just like you can fool your doctor. At it's core, Fitbit is nothing more than measuring some normal movements and associated vibrations of walking. So if you ride your bicycle on a bumpy road, yes, the count could go wrong. In fact Fitbit specifically asks you which is your dominant hand to adjust to this variance. But the larger question or the reason you are buying this is not to check how accurate the count or Fitbit is , but rather "How can I get healthy and lose weight?". Over a period of weeks and months, the outlier events won't make a difference and the numbers will slow and steadily nudge you towards healthy lifestyle. MYFITNESSPAL DOT COM : Physical activity can take you only so far. I would say tracking your food is more important than Fitbit. in fact I would say, you can lose more weight just by religiously using Myfitnesspal dot com. They have a rich database of Food.. Fastfood, super market food, deli food ... you name it . As an example Type in "McDonalds" and the entire menu pops up. The choices could include Mcdonalds Grilled chicken burger(no cheese) or with extra cheese. It is so convenient and just click and pick. You can even add your own food. I was floored to see even Indian food like Idly (rice cake), sambhar(soup) , appalam(Indian Tortilla) were all there smiling at you.It is truly free,no ads, no popups nothing. MIRACLE PICTURES: Look for inspiration at community dot myfitnesspal dot com forwardslash en forwardslash categories forwardslash success dash stories .. See the miraculous pictures of people who have lost weight,many the 'old fashioned' way of controlling what you eat and being active. Check out the pictures of usmcmp, a 217 lb single mom with a child who LOST 70LBS. Pictures,experiences and stories of a MORBIDLY OBESE man (vismal) who is now having 6 PACK , or you might be able to better relate to soprnomama, a 34 year old women who LOST 55LBS and went from tight 16 to size 8 dress. While there also check out the profile of hanymamdouh, a middle age man, who LOST 157LBS and of course, cincysweetheart, who LOST 101LBS . Hundreds of such stories of common man and women with all the earthly problems that all of us have. ( Sorry, I am not paid by myfitnesspal - JUST A FAN) Best of all , all your activity in Fitbit gets synched with Myfitnesspal. So your 10,000 steps might have helped you burn 500 calories and will reduce your net calorie intake for the day. Here is a sample Reading in MyfitnessPal Calories Remaining 422 Food :1223 Calories (MyfitnessPal) Exercise :106 calories ( from fitbit + you can enter activity like Gym Visit) Nice Graph of your progress FITBIT ARIA WEIGHING SCALE: There are many in the market but fitbit Aria helps in synching your weight to fitbit and the weight gets added to Fitbit dashboard, which seamlessly gets integrated to Myfitnesspal. WHAT YOU DO NOT NEED: Fitbit offers a Premium service. Save your money. It is pretty basic . Use MyFitnessPal Instead. EXTREME FITNESS EASY WAY: I wish one tracker does all of them, but as of now, if you are big into swimming , use FINIS Swimsense Performance Monitor , use mapmyride dot com for bicycling. In fact there are tracker for anything and everything and most of them sync with Myfitnesspal. For example, did you know how to reduce your back pain.. Here you go Lumo Lift - Posture and Activity Tracker SUMMARY: There are several Fitness Trackers in the market. Fitbit Charge is just one of them and probably the best. As far as I Know Fitbit is the only company that has been build ground up exclusively focusing on health trackers. For other companies like Nike,Garmin , it is just another product line. Whichever fitness tracker you chose , make sure it integrates with myfitnesspal. Between Fitbit Charge, MyFitnessPal And Fitbit Aria Wi-Fi Smart Scale, Black, I can promise you the first thing you will notice is that you will stop the steady weight increase. Slow and steady you will gain more energy and then start losing weight. 'Buffett lunch' will not be that appealing anymore. This is a 'real' deal.