Are fitness watches worth it???

I love my Fitbit!!!! its not 100 percent accurate but thats ok. I use that to figure out my calorie intake. It kept my from eating too low of calories. I can actually lose weight eating 2400 calories a day which blows my mind. It also has prompted my to start taking walks daily and overall up my activity level. Do some research and watch for sales. I got my during the holidays for $80 ish

Whether it’s worth it or not is going to depend on you.

I love mine and I have used several brands. Fitbit is the brand I stuck with the longest, because I found them to be accurate enough for me and I liked the app. There are a couple brands that I noticed would undercount steps by a lot (misfit for example...tried ray and flash models....70-80 steps counted per 100 steps walked. I had a similar experience with a jawbone move which was a clip on). I recently switched to Apple Watch and have noticed pretty similar calories burned/steps/ect as I had with Fitbit.

For me though a tracker has become a part of my daily life. I use mine to monitor my activity and adjust my calories accordingly. The result is that I have increased my activity a lot over the years because I didn’t like how few calories I could eat when I was inactive (and still don’t).

Not everyone finds them beneficial though. Some people find they become obsessive and their step goals. Others find they don’t tell them anything they didn’t already know.

I really love my Apple watch, but because of the other functions as well as fitness

Trackers may try to sell "accuracy" out of the box; but accuracy is not necessary to achieve usefulness.

Consistency is. And all major brands can offer consistent estimates to someone who is not pushing the limits of exercise.

Your apparent accuracy will be heavily influenced by the accuracy of your food intake logging and by how close to the average you track. And most major manufacturers start from the same base formulas though they do tweak their "detection" decision making.

Most (good) trackers will urge you to move a bit (or a lot) more by "game-ifying" activity. This was not a bad thing in my books, especially since I started from "I am sedentary but wanting to change that" status.

Apple and Garmin promote higher intensity exercise more than Fitbit does. I note that higher intensity exercise does NOT *necessarily* result in more calories getting spent OVERALL (because other things are not always equal), though it may provide more "feel good hormones" and improve athletic performance faster than moderate intensity exercise. This assumes a certain level of fitness. Below that level moderate exercise may be a much wiser start.

People tend to stay with the same tracker eco-system so you may want to consider that before committing. Especially the long term costs.

I've personally stuck to mid level Fitbits because the smartphone features and larger size of more expensive models were more of an annoyance than a help. I'm next to my smartphone anyway and hold it in my hand, so no need to pay extra for smartphone features on my watch.

If I were more of a cyclist or a runner Garmin might have been a more interesting eco-system. However their more interesting options appeared to be a bit more expensive and I after a bad experience on their forums while I was using one of their less expensive trackers, I quickly moved on to Fitbit. Which has proven to be more than good enough for my needs.

I really like having my Fitbit charge 2. I would recommend it as in the grand scheme of things it’s relatively inexpensive and yet I get a lot of interesting data from it - HR, calories, steps, sleep patterns etc.

You could pick up a second hand device on eBay.

Fitbit have good customer services and have repeatedly sent me free replacements due to broken straps, cracked screens, sudden death etc.

I am happy with my fitbit Versa--but really I monitor steps and active minutes more than anything else (walking is my main exercise). When I use my recumbent (indoors) bike, I just keep my hand on my thigh to track that activity-I don't manually enter exercises. I also like that it reminds me to move during the day, and I can view text messages to see if I need to follow-up on anything. I don't always carry my Iphone with me.

heybales wrote: »

Fitness_is_dope wrote: »

I've heard they're pretty inaccurate and that Apple is the only one worth investing in if at all. I would just like to know how many calories I'm burning and my Heart Rate because I am pretty sedentary apart from going to the gym a few times a week.

I don't mind to spend the money but they're not cheap so just want to know your experience and if it's worthwhile purchase.

Thanks

Actually, the name brands are all decently accurate at average daily activity type stuff.

The studies where they slap a device on someone for 4 hrs or a day show failure because these newer ones with HR require 1-2 weeks getting to know personal stats to improve estimates.

They have to try to figure out your resting HR, used for workout calories.
They have to figure out the point or range where you have moved from daily activity to exercise, in order to not use HR-based calorie burn when you would get the most inflated calculations, but stick to step-based calories.
They hope you have tweaked the stride length correctly for those step-based calc's using distance from the steps, which doesn't matter if you get low steps - but would be worse as steps go way high.

Apple does all those same things, and people have shown it can be just as untrustworthy in out-of-ordinary average situations too.

The all measure HR through light which has inaccuracy potential depending on your hair/skin/vessels, and depending on your body varying degrees of accuracy as the exercise intensity goes up - which can influence calories.

During a month of training for triathlon where I really nailed the food logging, my weight changes was around 3% of what the logged numbers would say should have occurred. That's really good.
I also logged all my workout calories from more reliable sources replacing whatever the Fitbit saw (and now same for Garmin) - and I tweaked a setting so it was using closer to tested BMR than calculated, so that the daily activity burn was best estimate.

@heybales What setting did you tweak so it's closer to the tested BMR? Mine fitbit is almost 200 calories higher than the tested one, so I've just been mentally deducting that, but if there's a setting that can be changed, that'd be great. I've tried to find one and couldn't, other than changing my height from 5'2" down to 4'3" and I'd rather not do that.

joeyzuraski wrote: »

It doesn't matter what device you buy. What really matters is that you are putting yourself into the effort. I've used the Watch for two models. Is it accurate? Somewhat. My Body Fat and my Weight still went up regardless of winning Exercise Minutes.

The reason both went up is because I'm not Dieting correctly and I'm not doing Personal Training to put the effort into weight loss. "Walking" for the most part is a lie to the Watch because my heart rate climbs high when I'm walking but my body fat still climbed up to 30% because I didn't train any of my muscles to lose fat. The lowest I used to be was 15% but that was when I was doing PT and watching my food which I plan to do again.

If you have time, be sure you record Exercise Minutes by Personal Training not by steady walking.

I know I am part of a tiny minority here - but I agree with joeyzuraski. I can throw any amount of money on devices / gimmicks / "diets" / personal trainers at my weight problem but only I can change to a healthier lifestyle, only I can decide what goes onto my shopping list, what I put into my mouth, if / how /when / I do some exercise. I did see my G.P. before I started to lose weight and this time around I will ask a dietitian for help should I get stuck again (i.e. a 9 months "plateau" last time around.) I have decided to trust MFP and greatly appreciate the support and encouragement of so many members - so far it works for me, thank you.

noel2fit wrote: »

I'm über frugal and can't see spending much on fitness extras when really just getting the basics down is where most people need to start. At the same time, I really wanted to join in the fun, so I grabbed the Fitbit Flex2 on Facebook Marketplace for $20 (new in the box). I'm a proponent of starting small and upgrading in the future if you really see the value in it. There are loads of products you can try out for a fraction of the cost by buying second-hand. I've been using my Flex for months now and I think it's perfect for me. It gets me up and walking around and keeps me accountable which was as much as I needed without the price tag of an apple watch.

Agree - and a question: has anybody thought why there are so many second hand "weight loss / exercise products" available on the market for a fraction of the initial cost? Maybe none of them work? Maybe I have to put in an effort all by myself? Fancy that...

I bought a Garmin Vivofit 2 a few years ago. I was just starting out with my weight loss efforts and didn't want to spend alot of money because honestly I didn't think I would use it. I was wrong. I love my device. I happen to be one of those folks who loves electronics though so that's part of it but it does motivate me to move more and I love that it tracks my sleep patterns. This has been helpful to get me to pay attention to these things. I could have lost weight without it but I do believe it helped me to stay motivated. It's an individual thing.

I think the reason there are a lot of devices on the second hand market is that the brands are clever at releasing their latest and greatest devices so people upgrade to the newest version with an extra feature or nicer aesthetics and sell on their old unit second hand to offset some of the outlay.

Fitbit Flex 2 is so worth it! I'd buy it from eBay though, get it for like $30.

Instead of putting a ton of faith in calorie burn estimates from fitness bands, I personally prefer to just track it based on average weight relative to calories consumed using something like 3suns adaptive tdee calculator (see https://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/4mhvpn/adaptive_tdee_tracking_spreadsheet_v3_rescue/). I think fitness products are generally close enough, though, although the longer you diet, the lower your neat goes so how much you burned acutely during exercise doesn't really tell you the full story.

Admittedly, tdee is not the typical way mfp is set up to work.

jessiedawn8400 wrote: »

@heybales I was considering overriding some of the calories from the middle of the night while I'm sleeping with an exercise entry of 1 calorie so the Fitbit would show less calories for the day and I wouldn't have to remember to mentally deduct it when reviewing all the numbers. You seem to know a lot about Fitbits... what are your thoughts with doing this? I'd have to do the math to see how many minutes I'd have to overwrite to cover the difference in BMR numbers. I'd rather not change the height setting since it is an HR-based unit. I have the Charge 3.

Excellent method, sadly the really nice way of like creating all the workouts on say Sun for the entire week should not work (you could test).
Since Fitbit is a replace-only method, if you entered one the night before, then the data from a sync the next morning should replace it.

But easy enough test, you know what the wake up values are normally.
Tonight just create that workout for 1am to whatever with 1 calorie, and see if the morning is down by that much.

200 cal adj / (BMR/1440) = min to use in your workout, probably approaching 3 hrs.

Since I don't think that will work, just have to have that workout created in the morning upon wakeup.
At least it's an easy one.