So I got this new gadget called a Fitbit, and we’re getting married. My iPad is going to be bummed, but we’ve grown apart ever since the third season of Game of Thrones ended.
Fitbit is where it’s at now. It’s a sleek black device that I wear on my wrist to monitor my fitness level and sleep. It syncs up with an app on my iPhone via the cloud to give me a constantly updated readout on my daily progress toward my fitness and sleep goals. So far, I’ve been pretty good about not obsessing too much and I’ve only been checking it like every 15 seconds. Definitely not more than that.
I’ve learned some new things and had some hunches confirmed. Hunches such as:
- I don’t so much sleep as fall into a light coma for at least 8 hours a night.
- I log about a half a mile a day just walking back and forth to the bathroom to pee.
- Yoga registers on my Fitbit as sleeping, basically.
Seriously people; yoga does not qualify as aerobic exercise. It might be great for your SOUL and SPIRIT, and it may tone some muscles here and there, but as far as your heart is concerned—I mean, your actual heart; not the one you metaphorically refer to when you talk about how yoga is “expanding your heart”—it’s nada. And also, just because I’m a diehard scientist, I have to mention that the yoga catchphrase “expand your heart” is kind of ironic according to Western medicine, in which an enlarged heart is a sure sign of imminent cardiac arrest and death.
To be fair, when I plugged yoga into my Fitbit as an “activity”—an option you can choose when what you’re doing isn’t registering as activity at all—Fitbit awarded my 75 minutes of (admittedly mellow) yoga with 167 calories burnt. Which is roughly the same amount of calories as in three macadamia nuts. Woot.
I’m honestly probably burning more calories obsessively scrolling through my Fitbit app than I am doing anything else, but the good news is that it’s getting me really focused on moving around more in an effort to meet the built-in goals. Like last night when I got home, instead of getting right in the bath with my library book—already a week overdue because I just can’t get through it (Beautiful Ruins, jury is out)—I took a long walk around my neighborhood on a rogue flower-picking mission to fill my gorgeous new vase from Heath Ceramics (thanks, Cindy!) and logged another half mile.
I know people who exercise because they feel genuinely inspired to move their bag of bones every day so they don’t get cranky. Me, I just like to be beholden to an electronic device. You have to do what works for you.
