In Love with my Fitbit!

Well, hey, everyone!

I have been super busy with holidays and packing on some poundage, but all to the good since I've just gone on another FatBet today!

I'm so pleased to be starting at exactly 140. That's counting the holiday poundage, but before that I was maintaining my last weight (after the last FatBet) pretty darn well. This time we have four people! $400 is on the line, and ten pounds is the goal. If I get to 130 I will be thrilled, since that's Goal 45.

But about my Fitbit...*sigh* It's the greatest. We are never apart! We even sleep together. I found out on the Fitbit community site that people are naming their trackers! Well, they're so cute--but somehow I'm not catching on; "Fitbit" seems like a good enough name to me.

Check out my sleep charts for today! I got a 100% efficiency on my nap!! I really zonked out. (You can't see the time in this shot, but it was 32 minutes.) My first 100%! And last night I got 90%. That's pretty good--usually I get in the low 80s. (Sorry about the low picture quality; I had to shoot the screen with my iPhone. I couldn't do a screen grab.)



Yesterday I got all 10,000 steps in and my activity score was up in the 800s (1000 is the goal). That was undoubtedly because I was babysitting Baby Jack!!! And I know you're dying to see a picture, so here you go:

(Well, okay, it's three pictures, but it's not like you can have too many.)



I got to feed him peas and rice cereal!! Every time I gave him the peas, he went "mmmmm!" God, I love being a grandmother.

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.)

And the Winner of the FatBet Is.....!!!

Nobody.

None of us lost ten pounds, but two of us lost significantly, so we feel great about that. We're currently considering donating our $100 to something worthy instead of taking it back. After all we did lose the bet.

But hey, since I drew the picture of me on the scale, back last August, I have lost 10.6 pounds! Not bad for an elderly lady. Let's see now, that's just over a pound a month.

I'm only slightly more than five pounds away from my goal weight!

And I have to say I feel great. I feel so much lighter and I even walk differently. I guess I must have been waddling slightly or something. AND, I have worn a tucked in shirt with a belt several times in the last few weeks. It's been at least four years since I've had the nerve to do that.

I don't think I'll ever diet alone again. This was the most motivating experience!

My plan now is to try to maintain my current weight and concentrate more on exercising. And after another month or so, two of us are going to have another go at a FatBet.

Weekday Update

I'm really having a spell of frantic activity here. Just to get up to speed: the FatBet is going strong, I'm still in the lead with almost five pounds lost (out of the goal of ten). We're more than halfway through though, so I really need to buckle down to it.

I finished The Poisonwood Bible and am working on my book report. What a book! If you haven't read it, get a copy and get going right away.

I need to review my goals list. I'm working really hard on several big long-term goals, but I need to see if there are some I can knock off pretty quickly. I'm not really stuck at 11/90, but it kind of feels like it.

And it refuses to be spring here in the New York Metro area. I hope it's better wherever you are, all you out there in the blogosphere.

FatBet Week Two

Most peculiarly, all the divas are now exactly tied in the race to lose ten pounds. All of us have lost 1.8--we have quite a task ahead of us if we're to make our goal by April 1!

I wasn't doing well on Weight Watchers this time--it just gets so obsessive, thinking about every little thing you put in your mouth. So I switched to low carb. It's so much easier, and immediately I started losing.

I have now broken into the 130s!!!! I'm so excited. I feel like my long-term goal (Number 45) is within reach very soon! Ta da!!

Also, I found myself with an unexpected opportunity to knock off one of my other goals: #51--Try green tea. I was on my way home from a rehearsal with a friend, rather a long drive, and we stopped because she wanted tea time. I wasn't sure what I wanted exactly--I didn't want regular tea--and then I noticed they had green tea. At Dunkin' Donuts! Who knew? So I had some. It's great!!! It has only a slightly different flavor from regular tea, and now I think I'm a green tea drinker! I'm going to try some more brands.

So my friend took my picture to record the event.

(It doesn't look very green, does it?)

More on the Great Big Fat Bet...

We have about got our Fat Bet underway. So far four people have indicated that they would commit.

The plan is to lose ten pounds in five weeks, at $10 a pound. So I have to cough up $100 into an escrow account, and if I don't lose the 10 pounds, I lose the $100. I don't know what your financial situation may be, but that's a motivator for me. And if I do lose the 10 pounds, I get my money back, plus a division of whatever lost bet money may be in the escrow. So it's a Lose-Win situation.

The start date should be coming up here shortly as soon as we get our act together.

I have a little problem right now in that I just got over the stomach flu, and lost a bunch of weight. My weight this morning was 142.6, down a pound from the last weight I recorded back in December. (I had gained a bunch during January when I was being bad!) So right now I'm trying to just maintain that weight until it's time to start. If it creeps up a little bit, that's all right with me.

I have a feeling that a lot of exercise video reviews are in my blogging future. Stay tuned...