The Chinese are monitoring my fitness

I’m a little late to the health monitoring game I guess. The Nintendo Wii was my first experience, letting me know that my weight wasn’t exactly ideal and then re-enforcing the impact with a rounder-than-I-would-have-liked avatar (brilliant motivator).

I used the MyFitnessPal app to monitor my food intake and specifically callories for a while. Thinking it would be burdensome, I actually found it liberating know that if I ate more than my target calories on one day, I’d simply eat a little less the next. I lost about 15–20 pounds.

A Suunto watch and then the Runkeeper app on my phone have tracked my sporadic attempts at running along with providing some limited social interaction. It gets annoying carrying a phone on a run, although it did give me more opportunity to listen to podcasts in-between the regular Runkeeper progress updates.

Now I have a Xiaomi Mi Band 2. A tiny wrist band. And it’s been great so far. You first have the option of either learning chinese to read the instructions or checking out the setup details online. It’s fairly easy though, pairs via bluetooth, syncs data into the Xiaomo Mi Fit app, which in turn then syncs with the Google Fit (or, I assume, the Apple equivalent). It tells the time, tracks steps, distance and heart rate, and can alert me of notifications or calls to my phone while the bluetooth connection is intact.

It also provides sleep tracking, although while checking the stats this morning I was apparently still asleep while doing so. So it may be a little inaccurate, either that or I’m in some kind of Inception Dream State. In which case you’re all creations of my subconscious and probably don’t need be reading this.

And the battery is still at 100% after 20 hours. Which is either great or a by-product of the dream-state time adjustment phenomenon.

I came back from a run this morning and by the time I’d recovered sufficiently to check my phone, the steps, distance and route had already been added to Google Fit.

A new little gadget for the collection and not bad at all so far, especially for $40.