Fitbit Day 1ish 9-12-13

Fitbit Day 1ish 9-12-13

I ordered the fitibit last Friday. I was incredibly curious to see if it would be an effective tool in my effort to lose weight. Lets talk about that!

When I graduated High school in 2006 I weighed 160 pounds. It was a bit annoying as I was told I was underweight. In 2007 I decided to be proactive and try to gain 20 pounds to get the doctor to stop nagging at me every year at my annual physical. To make a long story short I was a little more than successful as now I weigh 273 pounds and the year is 2013. So to recap in 6 years. I gained 113 pounds. That’s 18.33 pounds a year. 

So let’s talk about why I want to lose my weight apart from the obvious “I am morbidly obese.” I am embarrassed by my very appearance. I am no longer able to find clothes that fit and have had to resort to wearing clothes I don’t like, or clothes that I buy online. I hate buying things like blue jeans online as every pair of pants is different from every other so a 38x34 pair of blue jeans for one brand is a 40x32 for another. T-shirts now fit on the first wear but after one wash they shrink just enough to make it impossible for me to stretch without exposing the entirety of my gut. I can’t get another size larger because that will fit me like a dress. The only solution to fix that problem would be to get my weight back down. A relatively new thing that occurred is that now when I sit in a car for a long period of time, somewhere in the vicinity of a half an hour it starts to feel as though my sides are pouring out from me. It’s an intense pain that cripples me for the rest of the evening as I am forced to lay down until my insides feel they have gone back in. I’m also always hot. Even when it’s considerably cold outside. I guess that’s also a weight related problem.

Things I feel I am no longer able to do include, take my shirt off when it gets hot outside, go swimming without a t-shirt, eat dessert at a restaurant without feeling judged by the waiter. Now I love swimming but I don’t feel it appropriate for me to go swimming anymore. I don’t ever want to be the guy the little kid looks at and says, “Mommy that man is fat.” That’s an idea that I find truly depressing. I tried all sorts of things to lose the weight I gained, I tried biking more, eating less, weight training, dieting. But the problem is I don’t feel like I accomplish something when I can’t see the real-time results. I’ve been looking into the Fitbit as a way of motivation as it would keep track of my steps, calories burned and distance traveled and provide me with a LED display that would give me an idea as to what I had accomplished that day. One LED is equal to 20% of the goal.

I got the Fitbit at about 5:30 pm. Shortly after arriving home from work. I plugged it in to my computer and did the setup. I decided to switch the display to go from showing me steps taken in a day to be calories burned in a day. The default calorie burn was set to 3000 and I was disappointed to see that upon unplugging my Fitbit I had already one whole LED lit up and the second was blinking. A little bit of reading later that evening showed me that it estimated calorie burn from the beginning of the day based on previous activity. I figured it had nothing to base my previous calorie burn on and was doing the best it could. I was disappointed by my first impression. Also, I feel the website is a bit awkward. The dashboard is nice but setting goals feels like a great deal more work than it has to be. Entering food also tended to be a bit of a pain in the butt. So I will find a better way to do it.