Fitbit! Better than FatBet?

So far, the answer to that question would have to be yes. The FatBet was truly motivating, and I spent some quality time with my friends who were in it with me. I don't really miss the social interaction, because everybody wants to look at my Fitbit Tracker and ask me questions! There is also a function on the website interface where you can invite friends and compare scores. I'm going to see if I can goad some people into joining me there. It's so motivating, you don't really need to plunk down the money for a FatBet. You don't even necessarily have to buy a tracker (it's $99 plus shipping), you can enter your stats and food and activities.

But the tracker is SOOOO CUUUUTE. And so fun! I'm so glad mine finally shipped. And I'm glad that they refused to send it out until they had worked out all (or hopefully most) of the kinks.

You can see how little it is--just two inches long. They keep calling it "thumb-sized" but really it's smaller. At least smaller than my thumb, and my hands aren't that big.

Below is what the readout looks like. (Sorry it's fuzzy, but it's so tiny you have to get really close. I can however read the numbers without my glasses.) You press a little button and it shows you how many steps you've taken that day. (My goal is 10,000.) You press it again, and it shows how many miles you've gone. Another click and it shows the calories you've burned. One more click and you get a little blue flower that grows as you get closer to your goal! (Shoot, I should have taken a picture of that.)

A really cool feature of the tracker is that you can put it into sleep mode and wear it to bed. There's a silky-soft cuff that you put on, and it has a little pocket for the tracker. It records your movement during the night, and can give you a pretty good picture of how well (or not) you're sleeping. Last night I got a score of 89%. I'm not sure how good that is. I was awake from 3:00 to 4:00. This morning I checked the interface online and got a very interesting chart that showed my sleep pattern during the night.

I like the Fitbit interface too. Entering your food for the day is a lot easier than using the Weight Watchers interface! And it has all kinds of little charts that automatically generate and tell you how you're doing.

The Fitbit support people are superlative. I had a glitch downloading the software--just a strange fluke that they had never heard of before--but the support people responded very quickly, and I was up and running in no time. Yesterday I even complained to them about a grammatical error. Today I got an email saying, "Thank you for noticing this and we will contact the website administrator about it." :-) [UPDATE: They actually corrected the error!!! OMG.]

So we'll see how this goes...I'll be posting more about it as I follow the program. (And I lost a half a pound already.)

A Great Way to Spend December

I have been SO good this week, except for one day when I went way over my wine limit. As my yoga DVD says, tell yourself one healthful thing to keep in mind for the day. I keep telling myself "Enjoy the discipline!" And I think I am, actually.

My weight today was 143.6, down two pounds from last week. Of course WW goes "tsk,tsk" because they think that's too much to lose in a week. Screw them. I'm eating all my points per day, most days, and going over into my flex points. I used 22 flex points last week. And it is, after all, December, so the shrinking is bound to ease up a little.

I'm feeling pretty good about my food. THE KEY IS to keep that afternoon snack going. Got to have my piece of fruit. If I don't, when I get home I tend to fall upon whatever is most handy and devour it. The cats are starting to keep out of sight when I come in the door.

One other thing: I'm eating no "diet" food. I use regular salad dressing, and regular butter. And of course olive oil, all in moderate quantities.

I've been getting fairly good grades except for that one day (see above) when I got a D+. The hardest thing is to make sure I do enough hand therapy per day. Yesterday I went to the actual hand therapist so I got a good workout. And my hand is so much better! I saw the doctor this morning and she was very impressed!

Exercising is going great! If I don't get to the treadmill or a long walk, I can always fall back on my yoga DVD, which I'm starting to love! I ordered another one this week, and also an aerobic DVD from The Firm. We'll see how that works out.

I'm telling you, this is a great way to spend December. Much better than feeling all apprehensive about how much weight I'm going to put on over the holidays, and looking forward to a January of restraint. I recommend getting a jump on your New Year's fitness resolutions.

P.S. I'm also really excited about a couple of Christmas presents I'm making. More about that later, because I don't want the recipients reading about it in my blog.