The Fitbit Flex can track your exercise, but the user has to give it a little bit of help to determine the type of exercise and your nutrition habits.
by Kate Baldwin, Viewpoints Fitness Contributor
These days everyone is talking about big data. From the stores we frequent to the websites open on our browsers, we are all aware that our movements are being tracked and turned into information that can be analyzed and quantified. If you love this kind of attention to details and figures, you will love the Fitbit Flex.
But be warned, most of the information you can gather about yourself and your fitness and nutrition, you will need to enter into the app. The Fitbit Flex only keeps track of your steps. You set the goals, you log in the records of your activities, you keep track of your water intake. The Fitbit Flex is a handy record-keeper, but like with any fitness goal, you still have to put in the work.
Read more from Kate on how to set up your Fitbit Flex.
Fitbit doesn’t track TYPE of exercise
Each activity you participate in must be logged manually either on your smart phone or notebook/IPad. If you go on a run, the Fitbit may keep track of your steps, but it won’t know you are running. So if you log a five-mile run, the Fitbit will also count those steps as steps. You might not get an entirely clear picture of what kind of steps you have taken. If you log your run after the fact, you will get double expenditure—for your steps taken AND the run. Ditto for the calories expended. You could adjust this by logging a shorter run, but who wants to log a run that is shorter than the one they took? Other kinds of activities might be simpler to log. For example, a bike ride, when you are not taking steps. But if you log “playing tag with kids” or “walking while pushing a stroller,” your movement will be counted double.
Water and Nutrition Tracking
I also wasn’t crazy that I had to monitor my water intake; I usually do a pretty good job of drinking water throughout the day. But it turns out I am terrible at logging my water drinking into the Fitbit Flex. One day I forgot to log my water intake entirely. so I got a big Zero for that day’s record. The Fitbit recommends you drink 48 oz. of water a day, and the app shows you a big empty outline of a person that fills up with blue based on the amount of water you’ve been drinking. On that day, my person was a big blank.
If you are intent on logging your calorie intake, this, too, must be done manually. You can set a calorie goal for yourself, and the Fitbit will let you know when you’ve reached that. But you have to remember, again, to log each food item you consume so that you can get an accurate record of your intake.
Overall, intake and expenditure are very reliant on your good record keeping. It’s nice to have am arm buddy to cheer you on, but this buddy requires some vigilance!
Kate Baldwin is a certified yoga instructor who specializes in ashtanga yoga, and she runs marathons on a regular basis. She started practicing yoga after many years of running. Kate finds that yoga balances the intensity of competitive running and creates strength and flexibility that she carries into her job as a writer, professor, and mother of four young children.
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