At Goal & Successfully Maintaining. So Why Am I Doing This All Over Again?

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  • frankwbrown
    frankwbrown Posts: 12,146 Member
    @springlering62, fitness trackers are great motivators!

    I have a similar story to yours, @Lietchi .
    I started my weight loss journey in July 2020. I have a Garmin 6x Pro, which was expensive but nevertheless a good investment in my personal health. When I started, I had to rely on swimming and stationary cycling, because walking was just too hard for me. This past October, I managed for the first time to hit 300,000 steps for the month (I actually exceeded that my a good margin)!
    I love the challenges and badges Garmin give me. They provide me with a little extra motivation, and that's something I need apparently. This past week, I reached level 4.
    Unfortunately, my VO2max is fairly poor and hasn't changed much at all. It was only 23 last December, and it's only 28 now. That, despite the fact that I've been swimming 1 mile+ 5-6 days/week for 6 months now.

  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 31,966 Member
    springlering62 wrote: »

    Do you have a fitness tracker? Are you utilizing it to the best of your ability? What can it do that you have you haven’t taken advantage of?

    Yes, no, I don't know. I know it does quite a bit of stuff that I *shouldn't* take advantage of, because it's clearly not very accurate. (Sleep tracking is *hilarious*. Stress tracking, for me, is completely incomprehensible, though others say it has meaningful patterns for them.)

    I don't find my tracker particularly motivational, but I'm pretty sure that makes me a weirdo. I do sometimes find it affirming, which to me is a different thing from motivation: What I mean is that I enjoy seeing the after-stats for some things, like how many exercise calories I've burned in the past month/year, or what its wild guess at my VO2max is, how fast we rowed with a particular lineup in the boat. Sometimes it's guiding, as in helping me make a workout hit the benchmarks I'm going for in terms of speed, HR zones, distance, or whatever.

    I like it the device lot, but mainly because I'm a data geek. Before fitness trackers were the common thing, I was using a GPS-based device (early Garmin Forerunner, not a 24/7 wearable) plus a Polar chest belt & watch (HR stats, not steps), plus a specialized rowing strokes-per-minute counter, to track workouts, monitoring performance and fitness stats (speed, distance, pace, resting HR, HR recovery, etc.). It's nice to have those data better time-correlated, and get some other stats in that mix besides.

    I don't try to get any particular number of steps (my main exercise is not steps based, and I have cr*p knees), so steps can vary from under 3000 to well over 15000. It's academically interesting, but not motivating.

    I feel some motivation to create a "bias toward movement" in my life and habits, but the tracker doesn't reflect that terribly well. There are various kinds of movement it doesn't really see, and my reasons for some of that movement are not calorie burn, but rather life-improvement in other ways (flexibility or balance, for example).
  • springlering62
    springlering62 Posts: 7,406 Member
    edited November 2021
    Y’all’s feedback is truly interesting. BL is a retired analyst and spreadsheet master for an international beverage company. I don’t know why I didn’t expect him to glom onto the watch data. He’s been so disinterested until he got one on his wrist.

    In two days it’s already unleashing his inner statistician, which is good and bad. He’s already increased his steps pretty dramatically, but is downright angry that Tai Chi doesn’t get more activity points. (Dude, first of all, you have to “start” the workout. Second of all, you’ve got to find a similar workout category. Third of all, his supportive wife has been in this Tai Chi class many times and very nearly poked my eyeballs out from boredom. I don’t expect many calories burned although I can see how it helps with balance and joint movement.)

    It does become easy to obsess over digital rewards and challenges. I had to stop doing Apple Watch group challenges for months because I’d find myself heatedly screaming at anonymous teammates “put the damn watch on your wrist!!!!” And the individual challenge turned into floods of tears when I came down with Covid the last few days of one and dropped
    to a much lower score.

    I sincerely wish Apple, in their zeal to prod me to improve my health, would recognize the need to build in rest days.

    And their algorithms to encourage you to improve
    are laughable. They snowball with success.

    This is my challenge for November:

    3el9do7qvznm.png
  • goal06082021
    goal06082021 Posts: 2,130 Member
    Deanner03 wrote: »
    springlering62 wrote: »

    Do you have a fitness tracker? Are you utilizing it to the best of your ability? What can it do that you have you haven’t taken advantage of?

    I love my Apple Watch. I track my steps, exercise, etc., and try to close those rings every day.

    What I THOUGHT I'd use it for was the above items. What I REALLY end up using it for most often is to ping my phone because I can't find it.

    Find-my-phone and speech-to-text were the two main things I used my Pebble Round for. I'm still mad that Fitbit bought Pebble and, rather than continue to support existing Pebble users, told us all to pound sand with our $200 devices and cannibalized the firmware for their latest offerings.

    I don't even WANT a fitness tracker, I just want wrist-mounted texting, find-my-phone, and audio controls that looks just a tiny bit fashionable or professional. Apple watches are ugly and everything on the market for non-iPhones is uglier. There, I said it.
  • ridiculous59
    ridiculous59 Posts: 2,820 Member
    edited November 2021
    I used to use the Samsung Health app on my old phone and/or mapmywalk to track my steps, but like someone else said, it compelled you to always carry your phone, which was inconvenient for movement around the house or office. I spent most of my working day on a computer and I found that wearing a watch of any kind bothered my wrist so I had no desire for a fitness tracker.

    But then I retired. And my daughter bought me the most basic of Fitbit models for my birthday. I wear it all the time. Like I said, it's the most basic model so doesn't have all the capabilities that your fancy ones have, but it tracks my steps like a champ. Just about every day I reach my goal of 10,000 steps. Lots of days I hit closer to 20,000 (the days I walk my dogs AND walk with my friends). I like having confirmation that I'm doing something right. Especially on those days when I feel like my eating was a big fat fail. I can look at my watch at bedtime and despite consuming half a bottle of wine, an entire Ritter chocolate bar, and a plate of some kind of sticky wings, I can tell myself "Well at least you got 12,000 steps.......".
  • COGypsy
    COGypsy Posts: 1,157 Member
    I would never have said that I find my Fitbit motivating. Informational, yes but not especially inspiring. After being out of commission the last couple of weeks, I'm actually surprised at how annoyed I am that I haven't hit my hourly OR daily step goals!
  • sheahughes
    sheahughes Posts: 133 Member
    Replying to a couple comments here so please bear with me...
    1) @springlering62 regarding the friends requests, I've gotten more blank profile pic requests in the last month than I have in 2 years and I think it is because I am trying to be more active on the forums

    2) regarding the fitness trackers, I've had a couple Garmin Polar watches, one without HR (but used with chest strap) and another with HR, a couple fitbits (starting with the old school clip on your hip ones) which invariably ended up in the washing machine or drowned in the swimming pool (water resistance on the earlier watches was pretty terrible) and then a couple Garmins which are hands-down my preferred although pricey - my current VenuS cost me $650 AUD but it is worth it in the long run, they tend to last 5 or more years for me compared to less-than or just over 12 months on the fitbits. The only thing I don't like is having to stop tracking my activity/sleep to charge it! I see they now have solar charging options available but they were out of my price range.

    I like being able to track with GPS, I have the PulseOX turned off for extended battery life and I loooove hitting my step goal - I have been known to walk laps of my kitchen on stormy nights to get to 10000. I used to have the ever-increasing auto-goal as mentioned above but oh my goodness, there are only so many steps a person can do in a day and when it was trying to get me over 32K at one point (when I was a trolley collector/cleaner) I turned it over to the good old set point of 10k. These days I reach it at least 4 times a week, which is great considering I get 2.5-3k steps during my 9-5 job.

    I wish that Garmin would become compatible with an app called EquiLab, which you use on your phone to track your horses steps/strides/jumping etc so I could use my phone with my Pivo pod (its a video pod that tracks the horse with auto zooming etc) so I could gather ALL the data from my rides but I am happy to just count my hr/exertion levels while riding with my phone in the pod capturing all my crappy posture and good moments.

    I've found the call answer/decline feature pretty handy, my son called the other night while I was riding with gloves on and a silent phone but I was able to answer without trying to unglove in a hurry so that is cool too.

    3) regarding the WLAF mentioned, I always wondered why I was all rugged up and no one else was, now I know it's a *thing* and something to count as a victory when the scale drops a bit.
  • luxia2020
    luxia2020 Posts: 55 Member
    I just wanted to jump in and say a big thank you for this thread! I just found it and felt compelled to binge read all eleven pages before I go to bed for a good giggle before bedtime! Thanks to this, I feel more comfortable about how I've only been able to log for the past 100 days. I'm still unsure how to fiddle with the macros, so I feel more satiated works, but progress is progress! I need to keep reminding myself of that!

    I used to own a Fitbit watch. Then I found the allure of a Samsung Galaxy Active Watch. The thing does what my old Fitbit did and tells me what weird messages my friends have sent me without me needing to grab my phone off the charger from across the room. In addition, it works with Samsung Health to track everything finally in one convenient app while syncing with MFP! Perfect. However, is it a good motivator to get me moving from my sedentary lifestyle? That's much harder to say. I move when it tells me to move, but needing to move past even 1,000 steps on a typical day seems like an enormous challenge. Maybe it's time I write in workout sessions like someone suggested on an earlier page as I've started doing with everything else. :/
  • springlering62
    springlering62 Posts: 7,406 Member
    @sheahughes i salute- and thank -you for being more active on the forums. The one thing that kept me going was reading these boards, knowing I wasn’t alone, absorbing other peoples’ experiences, knowing they had the same frustrations as me.

    The Success Stories threads are still motivating for me, but, in maintenance now, the “I’m Back” posts are even more motivating.

    And I feel ya, hon. I can’t count the days when I’ve done laps inside the house, climbed on the exercise bike at 11pm, or done a hoochiecoo dance wearing nothing but the watch to close a ring.

    @luxia2020 does your tracker give you the option to automatically share workouts to your diary? Or you can log them by hand, although using their calculations seems to be less accurate.

  • pridesabtch
    pridesabtch Posts: 2,303 Member
    Thank you for this thread, I love reading it. You are honest and kind spirited with many helpful tips.

    If I'm scrubbing floors by hand I may count housecleaning, but it is very, very rare. House keeping is not my strong suit.

    Cooking I just laugh as I imagine them doing squats or jumping jacks while chopping veggies.
  • springlering62
    springlering62 Posts: 7,406 Member
    edited November 2021
    pridesabtch wrote: »
    Thank you for this thread, I love reading it. You are honest and kind spirited with many helpful tips.

    If I'm scrubbing floors by hand I may count housecleaning, but it is very, very rare. House keeping is not my strong suit.

    Cooking I just laugh as I imagine them doing squats or jumping jacks while chopping veggies.

    Agree. If it’s something unusual like that (and it’s a hoot that we both get on hands and knees and scrub- you must have the same irritating cloudy engineered flooring as me!) but I’ve seen entries for “making beds”, “washing dishes” etc. To me, if you’re going to invest that much energy into fooling yourself, take a walk or something. Generally, those are the users who post for a few days or couple weeks and then you never hear from them again.

    And for you meal prep pets, who do a weeks worth of meals in one blow, I’m not talking to you, either.
  • luxia2020
    luxia2020 Posts: 55 Member
    springlering62 wrote: »
    @luxia2020 does your tracker give you the option to automatically share workouts to your diary? Or you can log them by hand, although using their calculations seems to be less accurate.

    I can choose to share workouts with MFP or log it manually. I just have it set to share steps but not adjust my calories automatically since my previous attempts ended pretty miserably because those "extra calories" really messed with my head.

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