Any ditched the fitness trackers? Any regrets?

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Replies

  • NorthCascades
    NorthCascades Posts: 10,970 Member
    My cat likes to lay on my hand and purr. Sometimes she'll follow me to bed, and go to sleep on my hand. I can't sleep like this, but I can't move my hand either, so my watch sees still and assumes I'm sleeping. The truth is it has no idea whether you're awake or asleep, it makes assumptions that are generally going to pan out but it's far from gospel. I've personally never seen any value in the sleep data because it isn't measuring sleep.
  • vanmep
    vanmep Posts: 406 Member
    [/quote]
    How did a watch give you insomnia? I sleep very poorly and track my sleep with mine but I can't imagine how it could cause insomnia.
    [/quote]

    Part of the reason I got rid of mine was it interrupted my sleep. I kept waking up with this thing on my arm and then I would think about whether I had been sleeping well or not, so then I'd have trouble getting back to sleep etc etc It became too much of a "thing."

  • xrj22
    xrj22 Posts: 195 Member
    Agreed. I just keep track of my miles or minutes. And even then, I don't feel the need to write it down every day. I know what a reasonable amount of exercise is for me, and I don't need an electronic devices to tell me whether I am doing it.
  • springlering62
    springlering62 Posts: 7,342 Member
    I love my Apple Watch for all it can do, with the bonus it’s calculating and reporting calories to MFP pretty darn accurately.

    What I did have a problem with - and had to back off of for sanity’s sake - was challenges and goals.

    I already walk and do other exercise several hours a day. Apple has an algorithm that’s supposed to challenge you but it kept adding more and more minutes or calories burned to my “goal”. I’m sorry, I can’t commit to what breaks down to about 4.5 hours a day of exercise to beat some arbitrary goal they’ve set based on last month’s stats.

    I had an unbroken 28 months of “perfect weeks” til I got food poisoning a couple of weeks ago and spent the day weak as a baby on the couch, which broke my “record”.

    The Challenges app was frustrating and maddening. If on a random team, I would bust my *kitten* for a perfect score, only to have one or two team members vanish, or not try. I came in “first place” (with many others) several months straight when they started doing individual challenges. I got sick from my second COVID shot on the last damn day of the challenge and it knocked me out of first, and the food poisoning a couple weeks later knocked me out of the running again.

    Apple is killing people with untenable, unsafe escalating challenges. There’s no days of rest built in. It’s a health app, for Pete’s sake!!!!

    I finally came to the conclusion that I was only impressing myself- and only hurting myself. I’ve tried to back off at least a little, and don’t even look at the challenges app any more.

    I got a new iPhone and did the thirty minute Q&A with a tech today and mentioned it’s a wonder Apple hasn’t been sued by someone as OCD and dim as me trying to keep up with challenges. He laughed and said I was not the first person who’s complained.
  • PepeLPew
    PepeLPew Posts: 95 Member
    I've had 3-4 Fibit watches over the years. They motivated me to aim for high step counts and then I discovered their calorie burns were wildly overestimated. Other than keeping track of steps, they're useless for me. I use a Polar heartrate monitor for any cardio exercises and am thinking of buying Garmin next time.
  • NorthCascades
    NorthCascades Posts: 10,970 Member
    I would love to have a Garmin solar watch. I'm assuming it records and can give me a chart of solar exposure over time. I have seasonal effective disorder and live in a place that gets a thousand years of darkness from November until April. I'm curious to see what correlations they're are between my mood, activity level, and other things, and how much sun I'm getting.