Fitbits question

A fitbit will not magically change you. It will not do the work for you. But if you are committed to working to change yourself, a fitbit or any activity tracker may be a helpful tool for you, depending on your personality. Are you motivated by numbers? Will setting a daily goal for calories burned or steps taken or minutes "very active" make you more aware of your activity level and more accountable to getting and staying active? If so, yes, get one.

But on the flip side, there are plenty of people who are stressed out by numbers and goals. Like, all the (editor's note: weirdos) who say that counting calories just makes them more aware of how much food they're NOT eating and may trigger them to eat more.

I got a fitbit last year as a Christmas gift after getting active and having already lost a little more than 55 lbs. Since then, I have lost another almost 90 lbs, and I'm a little addicted to my fitbit data. It definitely encouraged me to add more activity to what I was already doing.

One very big caveat I'll give: it's very good at quantifying walking, running, and in a big-picture sort of way how much fidgeting / non-exercise "chores" you do (like: it can sort of 'tell' on days I do a lot of laundry or run errands -- those days show up with higher activity levels and burn rates for me quite clearly). However, it's crap at tracking workouts that aren't running. Lots of times I'll do a sweaty sweaty cardio workout with a kettlebell where I know my heart rate got up really high for a long time, and it gives me about half the credit it gives me for walking. So. If you live somewhere that gets too cold for walking in the winter, and if you want to track more than how much you're doing chores around the house, I'd wait until spring to get one, because what you get out of it will be limited until you can get outside and walk.

To be clear, it does a pretty good job actually of telling whether you got up off the couch or not. For anyone who just needs a little motivation to sit less, even just indoors, it is pretty good actually. But yeah, don't count on any of the models currently available to track workouts accurately.