Right at the beginning of last year, I started wearing a Fitbit One. I wore it almost every single day for an entire year. There were maybe 5 days in the year when I forgot to wear it so I have a pretty good data set to work with. Let’s take a look…
- My average number of steps in a day was 7066. That puts me on the high end of the American average (5900-6900/day), but still somewhere right on the border of “low active” and “somewhat active” on the charts. It’s pretty clear that I could stand to take some more walks since I have a desk job.
- I took the most steps in June which makes sense because I was spending gobs of time in the yard working on that project. I averaged over 10,000 steps/day during June. While it peaked in the summer, I’ve kept it up better in the fall and winter. I think this is because Elijah is walking now. He and I take a lot of walks around the neighborhood to get some exercise and point at every single plane that flies overhead.
- My three biggest days were all yardwork days.
- The day we moved dirt into the back yard: 24,157
- The day we put sod into the front yard: 23,310
- The day we demolished the back yard: 21,313
- Our day at the Indy 500 was #4 on the list with 18,559 steps. That place is HUGE.
- In one year I walked over 2.5 million steps.
I also used the Fitbit app on my phone to record my weight pretty regularly. Seeing that chart was a big factor in losing 25 pounds in the first half of the year. Unfortunately (and unsurprisingly), the chart doesn’t look as good for the second half of the year. I gained a little over half of that back.
I’m done wearing the Fitbit, at least for daily use. I might still carry it on hikes or days when I know I’ll be really active, but otherwise I’ve gotten a pretty good feeling for what a good day of walking feels like.
The really concerning thing to me is the weight I’ve regained. Tyla and I ordered a Fitbit Aria scale that connects to our Wi-Fi network. It will automatically record our weight every day. We both did this somewhat manually before so the automation will be nice. I’m also shooting to get back under 210 and stay there.
With one of the latest updates to my Nokia Lumia Icon, I now have a pedometer with me at all times and I don’t even have to carry a Fitbit! Newer Lumias have a motion sensor in them and one of the features is a step counter. (The steps show up in the Health and Fitness app.) You can also get some pretty cool data about your location and motion in the motion data settings section. WPCentral has a good rundown of the new features there.