Reviews

89 days on the Fitbit Sense

I need to lose weight. Being stuck in a house for a year took its toll and I was already hefty before, but now my wolf and kitten t-shirts are straining to keep up with me. I decided to go for a Fitbit Sense and metric my path to health a bit. Today’s day 89 and it’s not looking right for me and I think it’s a bit of the app’s fault.

No, I’m not blaming my weight on the app, however I am saying my expected progress by Fitbit’s goals is not matching actual. This can be from a variety of reasons such as when the Fitbit Sense thought I was doing 20-50% more exercise than I was, to a slow metabolism which I’m pretty sure I’ve entered into during this past month when it has either been 103F, raining sideways, or I was sick.

I am really good about food logging. I’m going to put that out there. When I was on MyFitnessPal, results were as expected, and usually a little better. Using Fitbit’s app they’re virtually non-existent. I’ve been debating whether this was due to my age or the app being flawed, but I’m leaning toward the app at this point.

The way the app’s calorie counter works is you set a goal – I set a moderate weight loss because I’m a piece of pudge at the moment and wanting attainable goals within a year or two timeframe. I’ve got a year of covid weight to shed and let me tell you it’s more than I want to admit. But I’m fine with losing it slowly.

And I should be losing it slowly according to the app. I’m not cheating on calories, I’m not as far as I know retaining large amounts of fluids, no, the app is not figuring out what works for me in its algorithm.

Formula is caloric goal = ((current weight’s maintain calories) -500) + (any additional burned) – eg I need 2000 calories to maintain, 1500 total to lose, then if I do 1000 calories of writing I need a total of 2500 calories to be 500 down.

And that worked for the first 10 pounds, until it didn’t. I’m not sure at this point whether we’re looking at my metabolism went into total turtle mode. There doesn’t seem to be automatic adjustments when your weight starts creeping back up to say “whoa, something’s not working here, no way you should be right back where you started”.

Other than the weight loss app side not working particularly well, it has started tracking my movements and stride more reasonably, although I think it might be overestimating the caloric effort I expend to exist and this might be causing the sliding-scale calorie intake to be over where it should.

Overall, for workouts the Sense is working. I’m really not thinking the weight loss algorithm is integrating calorie intakes, age, and calories expended correctly. Might just be me though. Might be I’ve reached a threshold of weight at which it’s a downhill slide and I’ll have to just stick it at X calories regardless.

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Paul E King

Paul King started with GoodAndEVO in 2011, which merged with Pocketables, and as of 2018 he's evidently the owner. He lives in Nashville, works at a film production company, is married with two kids. Facebook | Twitter | Donate | More posts by Paul | Subscribe to Paul's posts

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