My New Health Habits With Fitbit
I’ve never been a huge fan of smartwatches. In fact, I’ve been deliberately avoiding them for quite a while. The first one that caught my attention, of course, was the Apple Watch. But even that one didn’t fully convince me to get one. After a couple of years, I finally decided to try one. Except I didn’t go for the Apple Watch, I decided to try Fitbit, their Charge 2 model.
I’m not going to lie. I don’t fully like Fitbit’s design and still think Apple’s approach to a smartwatch is certainly nicer, but Fitbit was cheaper and a good way to find out if these things would work for me. You know what the greatest thing about this purchase was? Not the smartwatch itself. really.

Fitbit’s App
It was Fitbit’s app. The app combines a whole lot of dimensions in a similar way to Apple Health. It has a pretty straight forward dashboard that shows a glance at how your day is going in terms of activity. It counts the steps I’ve taken, the calories I’ve burned and my active minutes. It even smartly recognizes the longer walks I take as workouts.
The hook is that it allows me to set goals for myself in each category. For instance, I have it setup aiming to take around 8,000 steps per day. That’s the metric that I care the most about so it shows the biggest in the dashboard. I also aim to burn about 2,700 calories and have at least 30 minutes of activity. These metrics show at the top of my dashboard too, in the shape of circles which I need to fill (similarly to Apple’s approach). It essentially gamifies my activity during the day, so I strive to fill these circles as much as I can. Gamifying habits is a good technique to stick with habits and Fitbit managed to do that for me with health and activity.
I, of course, had tried this approach before but I never stuck with it for one simple reason: I hate having to input things manually if I can avoid it. Fitbit measures my progress for me so I just have focus on moving :)
Nutrition
I don’t know if this was a coincidence or a consequence of starting to measure and care about my activity, but lately I developed a big interest in nutrition. I started reading about macronutrients and their role in our bodies, how we store fat, how these macronutrients turn into energy, and so on and so forth.
Fitbit’s app lets me input the food I eat every day and gives me insights on how much protein, carbohydrates and fat and consuming with my existing habits. It also tells me how many calories I’m bringin in and contrasts that metric to the number of calories I burn throughout the day. This is certainly not life changing, but being aware of what you eat is a good first step into improving how you eat. While I haven’t really started any specific diet, I now know where to cut some calories and where to add some in order to keep things balanced and meet my goals.

But there’s more…
This isn’t the full story though. There are two more factors that have made my Fitbit journey somewhat successful. The first one being that I had to commit to taking it seriously. I didn’t commit to wear it and work out every single day for a year or anythinglike that. I would just take that information seriously and I wouldn’t cheat. That’s manageable enough and doesn’t get to overwhealm me, so I haven’t found myself wanting to quit.
The second factor is Fitbit Coach: their training and workouts subscription based program. I’m not going to go into detail about that in this post, but I do intend to share my experience with it later. I want to keep trying it and see how it develops before sharing an opinion.
There are quite a few things that have worked nicely for me in terms of my health habits lately. Some thanks to Fitbit, and some others to plain old discipline, but there’s still a long way to go for me. I’ll see how this keeps developing. Maybe I’ll even try the Apple Watch now that I found a use for these things :)
